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Since the reading/tactics vs theory/strategy discussion had completely taken over the thread, I moved it to its own thread: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1470

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Although totally OT, I'd like to comment on this. If you are talking about French specifically (or many other languages, but not nearly all), you have a point, because it can be very hard to learn pronunciation from a book. However, this also depends on your own background, but e.g. for me it is very difficult. OTOH, there are other languages, where the pronunciation is very straightforward and can be learned easily (for me e.g. Italian is such a language, I bet I could learn basic Italian from a book and be able to even speak and understand it). I get your general idea, but it greatly depends.

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Sure. Go is about black and white stones played consecutively on a board, in a way which maximizes the final score.



It's not false if you win

Hello all,

if you want to discover a lot of practical things for not too expensive, the second book of go is wonderful.
For me, you can learn a whole lot until you reach KGS dan level !

http://www.kiseido.com/Begin2.htm#K31

Then, for the reading skills, these two other books are must have :

The tsumegos, so much alive and dead shapes you can't imagine :
http://www.kiseido.com/Begin3.htm#K13

The tesujis, things you would never play :
http://www.kiseido.com/Begin3.htm#K12

If you master these, you will be pretty strong !

You raise some good points, but I wasn't talking about pronunciation at all. What I had in mind was fluency. Even if you know the words and the correct grammar, you can still put them together in a way that native speakers will find very awkward and even wrong. Something similar happens in Go. When I play Go with novices I often see them make moves that I think are completely off the mark. This happens because they are not fluent in Go. What do they need to do to improve their fluency? I believe the thing that will work for most people is 1) to have lots of practice and 2) to have your errors corrected by someone who is already fluent. That's why I recommend doing tsumego and getting your games reviewed.

Books might be useful but most of the stuff I read in books never happened in my games.
On the other hand, a game review (even a short one) was always very useful because it addressed my weaknesses and misunderstandings directly.

Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go used to be my absolute favorite book on an over all explination of the game. I reread it a couple of times a year.

Fundamental Principles of Go Yi-lun Yang (slate and shell) has taken its place.