Japanese Game Language

Trump

So today was my first assesment on my independant study of games. My sensei was pretty impressed with my research thusfar. Because of the holiday last week, I've had two weeks to work on my independant study, I feel like I've used my time wisely.

At first I wasn't sure what I wanted to start with. Board Games or Card Games, and should I focus on a specific game, or just on the general terminology. At first I very half heartedly flipped through my rule books, and picked up terms out of the dictionary.

It wasn't until last thursday that it all started to really come together. I had a meeting with my Japanese Conversation partner, we talked a while, untill I broke out my Uno deck. We played Uno for a while, and had some back and forth over the rules. She played where if you play a draw 2 on a draw 2 then it passes to the person next to you. I think I've played that rule before, but I'd forgotten it. I tried to explain Killer Uno to here, that I learned from Dan, Jess, and Ben freshman year. She understood, but wanted to just play regular Uno.

While we played Uno I asked her a bunch of questions about how to say certain things. Hand, deck, play a card, draw a card. She said that there was no word for deck (I eventually found one). I also asked her what other card games she knew, not many was her reply, though she did know Trump. Which I've heard to be a very popular card game in Japan. So after Uno she taught me Trump, which is a very simple but fun game. So simple in fact that I figured I would be able to describe it using my limited Japanese. We really started having fun when Jessi and I taught Shoko Go Fish. We played probably 10 rounds of card games all told and I had ample motivation to work on my independant study.

I managed to come up with 20 vocab words, 5 grammar points, and I transcribed a set of rules for Trump in Japanese. It was great fun, I had to get a little creative, but when I showed Sensei he said most of it was spot on. There were a few points that he was able to help me on in terms of the conjugation of things, and explained to me two different grammar points.

I worked a lot with IF/THEN statements, but in Japanese there are two forms of IF/THEN, a stronger one and a weaker one. One means that the effect must follow the cause, where the other one is more like a suggestion.

If you throw a ball into the air, then it will fall down.

If you have a pair, then you can play it.

I'm actually very pleased with how it turned out. If you're at all interested I'll transcibe a post for it, but for now I'll just show some of the vocab I learned.

Card Terminology

Deck: 　やまふだ (yamafuda)
Hand:　てふだ (tefuda)
Cards：カード (kaado)
Players：せんしゅ (senshu)

To shuffle cards: カードをきる (kaado o kiru)
To draw a card：カードをひきます (kaado o hiku)
To play a card: 　カードをだします (kaado o dasu)
To win：かちます (kachimasu)
To lose：まけます (makemasu)


Also

Killer Uno

Like regular Uno with 3 exceptions.

Zero Pass- When you play a zero everyone passes their hands in the dirrection of play.

Attrition -If you have a set of cards that are all the same color that add up to the number on the board you may play them together as though they were that card. They must be the same color as each other and the same color as the card on the board.

Stealing -If you have a card that matches the color and number of the card on the board (or you have cards that add up to the number on the board) you may play it even if it isn't your turn. After you do so the person next to you continues play.



Game Language across culture. Huzza!

-Mack