The second AI hackathon I joined turned out to be run in English.
It was AI Founders’ Mindset Hackathon #001. It was co-hosted by Datadog, and the venue was their Tokyo office.
But when I signed up, I had no idea that
the event would be run in English.
Since it was in Tokyo, I just assumed it would be in Japanese, like my first one.
Thinking back now, the Luma event page was in English. It definitely was.
But I didn’t think anything of it. I understand English, so I think it just slipped right past me.
I still had my first hackathon in mind, so I assumed this one would be the same.
Then I actually went. At reception, almost all the name tags lined up on the table were in the Roman alphabet. I couldn’t find mine.
Finally, off to the side, there were just a few name tags written in Japanese characters, and mine was among them.
I wondered why mine was one of the only ones in Japanese, and I mentioned it to the reception staff and we laughed about it.
After a while, I realized that most of the participants weren’t Japanese.
I was a little surprised. Oh, so that’s how it was.
The event started.
It was run in English (haha).
In this article, I want to share what it felt like to actually join an AI hackathon that was run in English.
Is it impossible to join if you can’t speak English?
What kind of people were there?
What language do teams talk in?
Can you get by with just a translation app?
Here’s what it was actually like, including all of that.
At the venue, most people weren’t Japanese
The first thing I noticed when I arrived was that
this was not an event full of Japanese participants at all.
Most of the participants weren’t Japanese.
Even though it was held in Tokyo, the atmosphere at the venue was very international.
From the very beginning, it felt different from the Japanese-focused events I had joined before.
Because it started on a Friday evening, some people seemed to have come straight from work.
Some had been joining hackathons like this for a while, and one participant told me:
“I come here for networking.”
That was when it really hit me that a hackathon isn’t just a place to build things — it’s also
a place to meet people working in AI and development.
Gemini (Google DeepMind), Devin (Cognition), and ElevenLabs took part in this hackathon as tool partners, and free credits were provided for participants.
People who seemed to be from each of those companies were at the venue too. One of the people from Devin was someone I had also seen at my first hackathon.
The instructions and the whole event were in English
Once the event started, everything — the explanations and the way the event was run — was in English.
The opening guidance.
The explanations of the sponsors and tools.
The conversations within the team.
Most of the conversations I could hear around me were in English too.
I don’t feel much resistance to speaking English myself, so rather than thinking,
“Oh, it’s in English,”
the stronger feeling was:
“It feels like I’m back in the US for the first time in a while.”
But for people who aren’t comfortable in English, I think this would be pretty tough.
A Japanese participant was using voice translation
There were some Japanese participants at the venue too.
One of them seemed to be having a really hard time communicating in English, and they had a Google voice translation app open on their phone.
I think they were using it to listen to English and turn it into Japanese.
Watching that, I thought:
“Oh, so that’s another way to do it.”
But when I talked to them later, they said:
“It wasn’t useful at all.”
That really stuck with me.
A translation app isn’t always enough
When people hear “English-language event,” they might think:
“There’s translation AI now, so it should be fine, right?”
But conversations at a real hackathon aren’t that tidy.
People around you are talking too.
Several people talk at the same time.
Technical terms come up.
People explain things while looking at a screen.
Short back-and-forths keep going, like:
“What should we do about this?”
“Okay, should I take this part?”
And on top of that, there’s a time limit.
It’s not the pace of a simple travel conversation, where you
say one sentence
↓
translate it
↓
think of a reply
So I think it’s really hard to keep up with everything using voice translation alone.
Hearing the person who was actually using it say,
“It wasn’t useful,”
felt very real.
So can you join if you don’t speak English?
This one is hard to answer.
I think it depends on the event.
For example, if an event clearly says
“Japanese or English welcome,”
or lets you form a Japanese-speaking team, it should be easier to join even if you’re not comfortable in English.
But in an environment where:
- the instructions are in English
- your teammates aren’t Japanese
- the team conversations are in English
- the presentation is in English
you’ll need quite a bit of English.
That’s a separate issue from whether you can write code.
Even if you have technical skills, it’s hard to build something together if you can’t communicate your ideas to your team.
On the other hand, even if you’re a technical beginner, it gets easier to take part if you can communicate things like:
“I’ll do this part.”
“What do you think of this idea?”
“I’ll do the presentation.”
I realized that English is one of the skills you use at hackathons like this.
Understanding English doesn’t mean you understand everything
By the way,
being able to speak English doesn’t make everything easy either (haha).
When the conversation got technical, I’d think:
“What does that word mean?”
“What’s that service?”
In fact, when my teammate was explaining our project to the judges, they used the word
“Vectorization.”
I could hear the word just fine in English. But I had no idea what it meant.
I asked my teammate about it later, and they finally explained it to me.
It’s completely normal to understand the English but not the content.
On the other hand,
some people understand the technical terms but have a hard time keeping up with the conversation.
So at English-language AI hackathons,
English skills and technical skills are two separate things.
Some people are strong in both.
Some are strong in just one.
And some are beginners at both.
There were plenty of things I didn’t understand either.
A lot of the participants were impressive engineers
As I expected,
the international participants at the English-language hackathon really were impressive engineers (haha).
Even just listening to the technical conversations, there were quite a few people at a completely different level from me.
But I was lucky — the person I teamed up with was kind and really nice.
I only noticed the acceptance email the day before, so I didn’t have time to set up accounts for new tools. That’s why I built with the ChatGPT and Claude Code I normally use.
When I told my teammate,
“I have ChatGPT write prompts for me, and then I copy and paste them into Claude Code,”
they said:
“My friend does it the same way.”
I had assumed everyone there was an amazing engineer, so that was a bit of a surprise.
At the end, my teammate also used ElevenLabs to add voice input and voice output features. I couldn’t go that far myself.
And even in a place like that, I — a non-engineer — was able to actually take part, join a team, and build something together.
So I don’t think you need to see it as
“English-language events = only for super-advanced people.”
That said, if an event is centered on English,
you should be ready to communicate with your team in English.
Talking with your team might matter most
What I felt from taking part was that
being able to talk with your teammates
might matter more than
“being able to understand everything said on stage.”
At a hackathon, you spend a lot of time building something together.
What to make.
Who does what.
How far along you are.
Whether there’s enough time.
How to handle the presentation.
Small discussions keep going the whole time.
This hackathon lasted about four hours in total, but the actual time we had for building was only about 85 minutes.
So even if you don’t understand 100% of what the MC says in English, you can fill in some of the gaps by reading the official materials or asking your teammates.
But if you can’t communicate within your team at all, that part gets really tough.
I was a little surprised by how many judges there were. They included Rakuten Card’s Chief AI Officer and people with backgrounds at Google DeepMind and Google. For me, at only my second hackathon, it looked like a really impressive lineup.
The first round of judging was a format where we went over to whichever judges were available and explained our project ourselves.
The presentation was just 3 minutes, with 2 minutes for Q&A. On our team, my teammate did the pitch.
What I’d check before applying to an English-language event
Now, when I find an event that looks like it might be in English, I don’t judge it
just by whether the event page is in English.
What I want to check is:
- the language used to run the event on the day
- the language used within teams
- the presentation language
- the Q&A language
- whether you can form a Japanese-speaking team
- whether there’s Japanese support
But in reality, very few events spell all of this out.
So when I post event information on this site, I want to separate out whatever I can find out about language as much as possible.
If something isn’t clear, it’s fine to just say
“Not confirmed.”
I don’t want to assume “it’s probably in Japanese” or “it’s probably in English.”
If needed, I’ll ask the organizer.
After going to an English-language event myself, I think this is really important.
Your English doesn’t need to be perfect, but relying only on translation may be tough
Here’s the conclusion I came to from what I actually saw.
Your English doesn’t have to be perfect.
It’s okay to make grammar mistakes.
It’s okay to use just words.
It’s okay to ask people to repeat themselves if you don’t understand.
There was even someone presenting while reading from a script on their phone. I thought I’d do the same next time.
But
trying to handle everything with just a translation app
might be pretty tough at an English-centered hackathon.
At least, that’s how it felt at the event I joined.
So if you’re interested in English-language events, I think it helps to think about it not as
“My English isn’t perfect, so I can’t do it,”
but as
“Could I handle the basic communication within a team?”
And how much English you need really varies from event to event.
Making that clearer before people apply is one of the things I want to do with this site.