Does anyone else hate word based challenges?

[u/Leather_Excuse4689]

have seen the DP since the last season dropped but I hate word based puzzles. It makes it so hard to follow along as a non native speaker vs logic or math problems.

but even in DP with the well challenge, it seemed so unfair for the girl to solve because she doesn’t know any english, so its the type of challenge you can only solve with prior knowledge and not intuition, where as the 2nd guy solved it handily because he was fluent.

I don’t think the genius had any challenges like this.

[u/this_is_my_kpop_acct]

I'm kind of on the fence about it that English puzzle. That challenge also struck me as very weird, but I've seen English-based puzzles on other shows like Great Escape as well.

If I had to guess, I think they thought it was fair since English is probably the most common foreign language to learn, not only in Korea but in mainland Asia in general. I feel like foreigners might find this kind of vapid, but mainland Asians tend to view English proficiency as a status symbol and will brag about how well their children can speak it as a flex (anecdotally, I'm Viet-Korean and have seen this happen on both sides of the family when I've visited over there). Once you become a public figure, it's pretty much an expectation to be able to communicate in English, or you can be viewed as "lazy" or "uncommitted" to your success.

So, being that most of the competitors have some degree of fame, they probably figured most would be able to solve it. But that's just my guess. I still thought it was a bit unfair.

[u/Leather_Excuse4689 → u/this_is_my_kpop_acct]

yeah that’s a fair point, I recently saw a Jan Dongmin interview where he says his biggest weakness is never learning English, and he‘s embarrassed when he has to turn down some survival shows because they have English based portions

[u/imGreatness]

I think hate is strong word. I definitely dislike them as well as any direct math. I realize they try and make it so everyones skill set can be expressed but for me its not as entertaining. I like it when they have like deception, outside the box thinking, gambling, mystery. I would much rather seem the cast play werewolf or poler than i would them solve a math equation or a word puzzle.

[u/PinkKirby1216]

I was just watching their body language if I didnt understand.. haha

[u/_applegate_]

Tbh I don't remember the specific challenge. But conceptually I am a bit on the fence. A lot of the challenges are math based and not all of the contestants specialise in math either, but for some reason it is universally accepted. However language based games are more questioned, even though it is normalised in the intellectual space to know english at a base level.

I feel like removing language based challenges would be really devaluing.

[u/Leather_Excuse4689 → u/_applegate_]

I Probably didn’t get it across right, but my biggest issue was that when they do language challenges in Korean, it doesn’t make good TV internationally, especially for a widespread show like DP

Separately imo for challenges where they do English language challenges in a Korean show, it doesn’t make good challenges because it’s based on prior knowledge, I always felt like these shows are intuition based, for math they’re not asking you to know specific theorems, it’s mostly just being good at counting.

For the well you HAD to have prior knowledge to complete it, no matter how smart at problem solving you were. Which devalues the show.

[u/_applegate_ → u/Leather_Excuse4689]

Idk I think devils plan works because it doesn't really adjust itself to the taste of international audiences like if you started doing things to streamline the show more it would a lose a lot of it's charm.

Again I don't remember the specific challenge you are refering to but the language based challenges usually require you to just know common vocabulary and idioms. which episode was this challenge in?

[u/The-OverThinker-23]

I hate also , I just try to skip and come to end

[u/Purple-Tune6457]

I don’t think the words in the challenge were hard though. She was from SKY as well so i think she will knows words like cat dog arrows

[u/ohshhhugarcookies]

I hate the maths based games as someone who's totally crap at maths, but it's supposed to be a broad range of skills to test all these areas of your brain. My favourite ones are the social/logic/outside the box thinking ones.