The Game That Lives Between Languages
The Idea That Wouldn't Leave Me Alone
It was the middle of a coding session — the kind where you're deep in flow, nothing else exists, and the only thing that matters is the next line of code. And then, out of nowhere, a completely unrelated thought hijacked my brain:
"Can a multilingual AI play word association games across languages?"
Not just simple translation. Not just "what rhymes with this." I mean the kind of wordplay that jumps between English, Indonesian, and Javanese — using phonetic tricks, slant rhymes, and cultural shortcuts that only make sense if you grew up speaking more than one language.
I closed my editor. I opened Gemini. And I went down a rabbit hole I didn't plan on.
What's a Nested Pun?
Before I tell you what happened with Gemini, I need to explain something. Because the whole reason this idea grabbed me in the first place is a type of joke that doesn't have a proper English name.
In my hometown in Java, we have a thing. It happens in group conversations — usually when someone is telling a story. In the middle of that story, someone will sneak in a word. But not just any word. They'll take the main word of the current topic, and thread it through two or three connected meanings — switching languages, playing with sounds, bending pronunciation — until they land on something completely unexpected.
The punchline isn't immediate. That's the beauty of it. The group goes quiet for five, maybe ten seconds. Everyone's face is doing the math. And then — one by one — people start laughing. The harder the chain, the bigger the laugh.
Here's a rough example:
Someone says "snack" in a conversation. In Indonesia, we pronounce the English word "snack" as "snek." Someone hears that, connects it to "ular" (Indonesian for snake). Then "venom." Then "hospital." The conversation has now completely derailed — and that's the joke.
The whole thing takes maybe three seconds to say, but the group needs ten seconds to unpack it. That delay? That's the whole point. The lag between hearing the pun and getting it is where the magic lives.
We call it nested pun. I don't know if that's the right term. But that's what it feels like — a pun with layers.
The Challenge: Gemini vs. The Pun
So here I am, mid-rabbit-hole, trying to explain this concept to Gemini. I gave it a simple task: connect a Start Word to a Target Word using a chain of steps across languages.
Here's what Gemini came up with:
Fire (EN) → Translation → Api (ID) Api (ID) → Rhyme → Sapi (ID, "cow") Sapi (ID) → Sound-alike → Satu (ID, "one") Satu (ID) → Rhyme → Batu (ID, "stone")
Technically? The chain follows rules. It moves. It connects. But something felt off.
I stared at it for a minute and realized — this isn't how my hometown plays the game. The connections were too loose. Too many options branching out from every word. Api could lead to tapi, rapi, papi, kapi — a dozen directions, none of them clever. It felt like a word search, not a word game.
And the rhymes? They didn't sound right.
Human Teaches the Machine
So I corrected Gemini. And this is where it got interesting.
I told it: in Indonesian, satu and batu are technically rhymes — they share the -atu ending. But S and B are completely different consonants. The weight of the words shifts too much. A better rhyming connection would be satu → catu, or batu → patuh — slant rhymes that feel natural to the ear.
I also pointed out the branching problem. Api → Sapi isn't a strong connection because from api you could go almost anywhere. But api → happy? That's a cross-language sound-alike that actually feels clever — Indonesian to English, using phonetic overlap.
Gemini's response was surprisingly honest:
"You just hit the nail on the head. Conceptually, it's a brilliant party game. Technically, it is an absolute nightmare to code or play consistently."
The AI was supposed to be the expert. Instead, I was teaching it the unspoken rules of a game my hometown already plays by instinct. Rules that live in cultural intuition, not in any textbook.
That's when I decided to write them down.
The Rules: The Lingua-Link Puzzle
I ended up designing a formal version of the game. I call it The Lingua-Link Puzzle — a cross-lingual word association game optimized for English, Indonesian, and Javanese.
Here's how it works.
The Goal
Connect a Start Word to a Target Word by building a short chain of steps. Each step crosses a linguistic gap using one of four link types.
The Constraints
- Step Count: The chain must be 3 to 4 steps long. Short enough to be snappy, long enough to be clever.
- The Golden Rule: You cannot use the same link type twice in a row. This prevents repetitive logic and forces creative switching.
- Cross-Linguistic Flexibility: You can switch languages at any point. That's the whole point.
The Four Link Types
A. Translation (T)
Direct translation from one language to another.
Kopi(ID) →Coffee(EN)
Simple, clean, the backbone of the game. But don't overuse it — that's what the Golden Rule is for.
B. Rhyme (R)
Words that share a close vowel-consonant structure. This includes slant rhymes and assonance — not just perfect rhymes.
Satu→Catu✅ (natural rhyme)Batu→Patuh✅ (slant rhyme)Satu→Batu❌ (technically rhymes, but consonant shift is too heavy)
The ear decides. If it sounds forced, it is.
C. Sound-Alike / Homophone (S)
Words from different languages that sound nearly identical or share strong phonetic overlap.
Api(ID) →Happy(EN)
These are the most satisfying links — they bridge languages through sound, not meaning. The cross-cultural moment where two words from different worlds碰巧sound the same.
D. Sub-word / Portmanteau (P)
Extracting a smaller root word hidden inside a larger compound word.
Matahari→Mata(eye)
A clean extraction. The word was hiding in plain sight.
Example Chain
Start Word: Snake (EN)
Target Word: Sepuluh (ID, "ten")
Here's the chain:
- Snake → Rhyme → Snack (EN)
- Snack → Translation → Cemilan (ID)
- Cemilan → Rhyme → Sembilan (ID, "nine")
- Sembilan → Translation/Sequence → Sepuluh (ID, "ten")
Link check: R → T → R → T ✅ — No consecutive types.
Four steps. Three rhymes, two languages, one connection. That's the game.
Why the Rules Matter
Without rules, word association is just... random. The constraints are what make it fun. The Golden Rule forces you to think laterally — you can't just keep rhyming, you have to switch strategies. The step count keeps it tight. The link types give you a framework without killing creativity.
The rules don't restrict the game. They create it.
What This Taught Me
I started this as a curiosity experiment — poking at an AI to see if it could handle multilingual humor. What I ended up with was something I didn't expect: a formalization of something my culture already does intuitively.
Gemini couldn't play well. Not because it's bad at language — but because the game encodes something that lives beyond logic. The right rhyme isn't just phonetically correct. It has to feel right. The right cross-language link isn't just sound-alike — it has to surprise you. And the whole chain has to land in that sweet spot where the listener's brain takes a few extra seconds to catch up.
Turns out, this isn't just a hunch. A recent study (Zangari et al., EMNLP 2025) found that LLMs — including Gemini and GPT-4o — rely on surface-level pattern matching when dealing with puns, rather than genuine understanding. When researchers subtly reformulated puns, model accuracy dropped by up to 50%. The conclusion? These models detect puns, but don't get them. Another study by Appen (2025) confirmed the same weakness extends to multilingual and culturally nuanced language. My informal experiment with Gemini turned out to be a small-scale case of what researchers are finding in controlled settings.
That delay — that five-second silence before the laugh — is the real game. And no AI has cracked it yet.
Maybe someday one will. But for now, the game still lives where it always has: between languages, between people, and in the spaces where words from different worlds together and somehow make sense.
Lingua-Link: A cross-lingual word chain game designed in multi languages, tested on an AI, and inspired by the nested puns of Java,indonesia.
Now go play it with someone who speaks more than one language. You'll need at least two. Three is better.