Reading Terry Chay's blog reminded me of the impact AD&D had on my own life.
I moved to the U.S. at age 13 from Taiwan without knowing ABCs, let alone any English words. My cousins, who we grew up with in Taipei and continued to be very close, had also moved to California right before us. For some reason, they had picked up AD&D.
Along with falling in love with some of my favorite 80s musicas, Walk Like An Egyptian, We Build the City, we also got to watch A Team and Knight Rider in English for the first time. Back in Taiwan and in the 80s, they were big hits, but only once a week on Saturday nights.
Sorry, I digressed. Back to AD&D... So cousins and I have not played it since the late 80s. But before I learned to construct proper sentences and learn my pronouns, these were some of my first words in the US: magicians, chain mails, swords, monsters, thieves, dice, dungeon-master, hit points.
Not sure if this is an improvement 20 years later, "korrect grammars, I haz dem"
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
My first vocabularies in the U.S.
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2 comments:
Oh yeah... AD&D, music from the 80s... those were things we shared. Me too. Words such as "ranger", "level", "paladin", "fireball" were among the first 100 words I learned after I came to the States.
We were fans of 49ers because we lived in the bay area. Joe Montana and Jerry Rice were such a great combination, weren't they? Agh! Those were good times!!!
I bet if we search the garage of Cupertino house, we can still find Monster Manual 1 to 3 stashed somewhere. AD&D offers "imagination" which is similar to reading a book. It is an art lost quickly in this digital age. It's amazing that I still remember what 3d10, 2d6, 1d16 all means! Yes.. it's good old days!
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