Never mind

At the risk of sounding too negative I would suggest that at your level you are going to benefit more from from just playing than from reviewing. I would judge the level to be somewhere around 20k. Just playing as much as you can will eliminate a lot of the mistakes you made much quicker than studying.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Clearly you are not going to improve with that attitude. I was suggesting that playing a lot would be good for you. Deleting the game in a fit of pique does not display the attitude needed to succeed at this game. Others may disagree with me and have something to offer.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I agree with what I'm guessing is the thrust of DrStraw's point -- that the most valuable thing for you at this point is just to build experience. There is a saying that the first thing one should do after learning the basic rules is to go out and lose 100 games. The point is that there is a lot about the game at first that is very difficult to describe to someone and the fastest way to pick it up is just to "get a feel for the game" by playing.

That said, I feel that I did benefit from doing some reading/studying at your stage. The hard part was to figure out what was useful to read because there is so much and I understood (and still understand) so little of it. I suggest looking at the AGA website and Sensei's Library beginner's pages for suggestions of good, broad intro books. Read them, but be strategic about what you focus on at first. For example, if you lose a corner in one game, that's a good time to go back and look at the related joseki (standard sequence of moves) for that corner. Working through it in the shadow of a recent game will help make some of the recommended moves make more sense, and you'll be much more likely to remember the sequence in the future.

Another thing that I did that helped tremendously was to pick a standard fuseki to start the game. I picked the sanrensei fuseki, but I don't think it matters what you choose. The goal is just to choose a starting point, begin to learn how that fuseki works, and then use what you learn to explore other options in the beginning. There is so little structure to the beginning of the game that I think it's easier if you pick a consistent starting point.

Anyway, I also agree that you shouldn't have deleted your question. I don't think DrStraw intended to insult you at all.

I'm content to just let him/her die in gote.

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