Evaluation Questionnaire of Japanese Go Terms Knowledge

Evaluation Questionnaire of Japanese Go Terms Knowledge

Theme
Soon after I began to play Go some years ago, I started to study Japanese at the university. That's why nowadays I am often surprised how well many Western Go players use Japanese Go terms. If you consider that most of the Go players do neither speak nor read Japanese, it is quite surprising that they use and integrate some Go Terms so fluently, as if they were part of their native language. Although some nuances in use sometimes might be considered to be strange, most of the players use the standardized expressions in a sensible and correct way. But- to what degree?
Go Terms = Japanese Go terms?
Although the Chinese and Korean language of course also provide special terms for Go, the fact that almost all Go terminology used by Western go players are of Japanese origin cannot easily be ignored.
Aim
Although you may doubt that the evaluated information is of any practical use, I believed it to be interesting to evaluate to what degree go players of different strength from different countries know and use which kind of go terms. But.. ☺...
Reality
...statistical evaluation possibilities are very limited by my poor excel and general statistics knowledge. I also tend to be quite lazy working in free time. Last not least I dislike the amount of work of inputting 22605 numbers into the computer. Quite bad preconditions if you want to obtain even only some few results.
Thanks
The kind and patient cooperation of Adelina Nicolaie, Ștefana Stihi, Luiza Teodorescu, Radu Atanasiu, Valentin Gheorghiu, Cătălin Pană, George Stihi, Thomas Schmid and Ulli Weiss, who some of them spent hours of their spare time made up with this. I would also like to give thanks to the Austrian Go Book Shop, which donated the three books to be given as our prizes in the lottery.
Mistakes
Reporting mistakes in the evaluation paper formula is not easy. I have to excuse, but I just put the list up some minutes before I left home to get here. Anyway: some mistakes proved to be interesting:
a) Two of the terms appeared twice in the list: nigiri (draw) and sangentobi (three space jump). It is quite funny to notice, that some of the 20 and 25 players, who changed their values writing them for the second time suddenly knew them AND actively used them, even they didn't hear them before, when asked for the first time. Some of them seem to have sudden lacks of memory as they were supposed to know the term, but didn't recognize again them when they appeared the second time ☺. Strange...
b) Even more funny is the fact, that more than 50% of the players have heard or use terms, which DO NOT EXIST. I nevertheless cannot make fun of it, because the spelling of those two words are too close to two really existing ones.
Tsukeatari, which doesn't make sense - and therefore does not exist - is similar to Tsukiatari (a move bumping head forwards into one or more rival stones).
Yodan, which does not exist, was originally supposed to be Yondan.
The difference are so marginal in size that conclusions related to 'honesty' or 'awareness' cannot be drawn: it is impossible to distinguish between players, who recognised, but "corrected" the term and players, who simply erred.
c) Anyway...As for the last Ozaru tobi (monkey jump) should be changed to Ozaru suberi (monkey slide) as this expression is the common one.
The participants...
Thank you to all participants, who found the time to answer the questionnaire. The number of participants is in total 137.
In fact more people attended, but we had to discard all the Japanese players before evaluation, as they are expected to know almost all of the words. Anyway, they participate in the lottery.
Austria 4 France 8 Poland 4 Sweden 4
Belgium 1 Germany 20 Romania 34 Great Britain 6
Czech Republik 4 Netherlands 23 Russia 2 Ukraine 5
Denmark 7 Korea 1 Slovenia 1 USA 1
Finland 3 Norway 1 Spain 2 Yugoslavia 6
...and their levels...
Players between 7 dan and 25 kyu were participating.
...something bizarre...
Also we have to report a funny phenomenon: Could you give me a logical reason for the fact, that 7 players simply forgot to fill in one complete column, which was always the same: number four out of five... Why?
Sorry to not have been able to put those in effect within the questionnaire.
Validity of correlation data
A total of 160 words with specific reference to GO were proposed. The statistical validity of the data is high, because we had so many players answering - at least, if we assume a good concentration and serious answers.
That's why the result of a fairly well correlation between knowledge and players' levels was definitely existing.
The correlation coefficient R is about 0,72 [the ideal value of correlation coefficient is 1]. This shows a general tendency, and that's all which can be expected in such a small sample.
But the dispersion (difference of max and min of one level) is quite high, so we can assume that a comparison of knowledge according to different countries could be interesting.
But a statistical evaluation according to the countries did prove to be worthwhile only for three countries such as Romania, the Netherlands or Germany, as the other ones had few players to participate. The danger of interpreting language use phenomenon as "different knowledge" would feed prejudices, so we decided to not compare "knowledge" according to "countries". This kind of evaluation would need a far larger number of participants.
Number of Participants according to strength
The players around shodan are not only the most ambitioned to play Go, but also the most ambitioned to take other challenges ☺.
This small evaluation is far too much work just for a congress.

Harald. R. Kroll