Yah, we never say Zugzwang or J'adoube or Desperado or En Passant or Fianchetto or Zwischenzug.
There's not so many foreign words to learn to understand Go compared to chess. For lots of the fundamental Go words, they'd need a new English word coined anyway or an imperfect metaphor.
This. Even the chess words that are anglicised have special meanings in chess. Being a native speaker of English doesn't help you understand what a "Bishop" is or what is "Checkmate" (OK, that's an anglicised Persian word) or the difference between a "Pin" and a "Skewer".
Also, most of the Japanese terms don't have a meaning outside Go, so it's not like Japanese people get a leg up there.
Japanese counting is more popular but you really don't need to worry about it until some high dan level if you play on 19x19. It takes a long, long time before you will be able to say confidently who is winning on 19x19 if the game is close.
I suck at Chess, but to me Go was much easier to learn. You can have quite a lot of fun without studying any openings.
I don't see how this is true unless you are memorizing the wiki like a dictionary. I can only think of 9 words that I use commonly in games (sente, gote, seki, ko, atari, hane, aji, tenuki, komi). Sure, I think the English Go community could try (and probably has tried) to reinvent translations for each of these, but they probably wouldn't catch on. "Seki" is easier to say than "mutual life", "sente" is more precise and easier to say than "initiative", "ko" is just ko.
I just don't feel like learning new words is any more difficult than keeping track of algebraic notation in chess, and I think it's just part of the commentating culture of both games.
> Which ruleset should I use?
As a beginner, you shouldn't worry about which one you use. They're almost the same except on some edge cases.
Uhhh... give this Japanese page a looksie: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/jp/8/docs/api/index.html
I think we got the better trade. Just my opinion though. Games which are more popular in the far-east will naturally use far-east terminology.
Similarly, things Americans do will get American-terms associated with them (IE: Programming Java). Its the nature of international trade. Even a Japanese-centric language, like Ruby, is largely composed of English terms to continue to appeal to the greater programming community. (Japanese programmers would learn "for" and "while" loops anyway, despite it being foreign terms).
Semaphores are "P" and "V" canonically meaning something in Dutch. Someone tried to explain it to me once, but you pretty much have to learn Dutch for the meaning of it all.
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Anyway, its the nature of working internationally. Gotta learn tidbits of the other people's language to really understand something.
"P" stands for "Prolaag", which is a word Dijkstra made up. Both Raise (Verhoog) and lower (Verlaag) start with a V in dutch. So knowing dutch doesn't really help with that one.
About localization, I started playing in a go club and the people I played with told me the Japanese names and their meaning. I already knew all the words when I started reading books. I understand that if you started reading books and watching videos from day one, that's a problem.
And about learning Go, the very first months are a very dense fog. Somebody never emerge from the fog.
The main difference that Japanese rules make on scoring is, essentially, codifying a matter of etiquette directly into the scoring: they aggressively penalize extending the game with unnecessary moves, which to be sure has some distortionary effects, but again, they don't essentially change what people considered the meat of the game; you'd play 90% the same game regardless of counting method, with differences cropping up basically once a player starts passing. This has far more ... pedagogical value outside the game, than the impact it has on the game itself.
By far the most important rules in a ruleset, in terms of how they affect core gameplay, are the repetition rules, and even the choice of suicide rule has a more substantial impact than the differences between scoring systems.
My biggest complaint is that the jargon is just out of control. For whatever reason, instead of localizing go jargon like the chess community has done, the Go community just uses native japanese terms for everything. This makes it super confusing as a beginner and you basically have to have the wiki[0] open all the time if you have any hope of understanding what people are saying.
For example, when reading a beginner's article:
"In this case you can't move here because of ko, so you would instead look for other pieces that are atari or close to atari - just be careful of seki"
Would a bit of localization killed the go community?
"In this case you can't move here because of the repetition rule, so you would instead look for other groups of pieces that can be captured or are close to being captured - just be careful not to get in a capture-stalemate scenario"
My second biggest complaint is that scoring is not straightforward at all and there are 2 rule sets (Chinese, Japanese). Which ruleset should I use? Are there any subtle strategy changes you need to make when switching between rulesets? When playing I have no idea who is currently winning if it looks close (i.e. roughly equal white/black areas) and I basically just wait for the computer to announce the winner at the end.
Anyway, just venting about my frustrations learning Go. Chess, by comparison, was much easier to learn. I didn't feel swamped with jargon and it was much easier for me to grasp which side was winning (though occasionally good chess players can pull a checkmate out of a seeming disadvantaged situation that I didn't see coming!)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms