Stemu wrote:
I've been skimming through a lot of go books but realized pretty quickly almost everything was a little too hard. Currently I'm reading Elementary go series vol 1 and Graded go problems for beginners vol 1. (It's a bit sad to realize how much trouble I've got with the basics but at least I figured it out and I'm fixing it now!)
Too hard? For problems you should be getting only half of them right. Otherwise, they are too easy. (OC, when you review you should do better.
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Re: difficulty of problem books, I usually find that the difficulty of problems throughout a book can be quite diverse. If a book has 1/3 obvious or easy, 1/3 medium and 1/3 hard problems, then I think the book is roughly at my level.
Obvious = I immediately see the good answer, and I only need a few seconds to check.
Easy = I can solve in roughly 30 seconds, with very few mistakes.
Medium = I need 1-3 minutes, and yet make occasional misreads
Hard = I have no intuition, so either I can't find the solution or I need several minutes of careful reading.
For such a book, my success rate is about 50% the first time (so this corresponds to Bill's criterion), 75% the second time if I review it just after (and 90% the third time if there is a third time). However, after a few months I tend to forget, so my success rate can be back to 70% or less... except if I have learned useful material from other books. For instance, some middle game problems in "Graded go problems for beginners 3" became much clearer after I had worked on "Tesuji" by Davis.
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139 H1 hane.