Life In 19x19

Mef wrote:consider learning a trade. A person may have a (relatively) short bit of educational background building, but then will do most of their skill building as an apprentice/journeyman practicing that trade again and again...when it comes to a practical situation, the focus is on doing it.

ez4u wrote:I do not know quite what to make of this topic. In my case I own around 200 Japanese Go books. Of course there are many drill books but the majority are typical books aimed at amateur... book buyers. Let's face it, publishers do not care about theories of learning, they care about selling books! Your average book buyer in Japan is not looking for materials to support an organized, 50-hour per week study program. They are looking for the quick fix that will help them beat Sato-san at the office over lunch. They buy the colorful titles that promise to reveal the secrets of top-level play by the big names in five easy chapters. That is why those titles dominate the displays in bookstores: Yamashita on fighting, Takao on thickness, Cho Chikun on counting, and Takemiya on anything he wants to write about. Tami has reported on a number of such books in recent months and has captured what they are like quit well. Currently MYCOM seems like the most aggressive publisher in Go space and they are very much into the celebrity + strategic theme formula. Never forget that regardless of how many strong Asian players you see on the servers, the vast majority of Go books are bought by us typical duffers with a little time on our hands and a little money burning a hole in our pockets. We are interested in the stuff that dreams are made of, not more drills!

RobertJasiek wrote:...
Common features of both Western and Asian books:
- examples
- short per example comments (but pure problem books or pure game collections might not have them)

Additional features of Western style:
- a significant fraction of the books has generalised knowledge stated explicitly as principles, procedures, methods etc. plus accompanying explanations
- a rather great fraction of the books has reasonably detailed informal descriptions of (further) attempts of generalised knowledge

Additional feature of Asian style:
- a significant but rather small fraction of the books has reasonably detailed informal descriptions of attempts of generalised knowledge...

hyperpape wrote:

Mef wrote:consider learning a trade. A person may have a (relatively) short bit of educational background building, but then will do most of their skill building as an apprentice/journeyman practicing that trade again and again...when it comes to a practical situation, the focus is on doing it.

And then there's the point that of those people learning a trade, only a fraction will truly practice or stretch themselves. The majority will be good enough to get by, and then stop expending effort.

rpchuang wrote:

ez4u wrote:I do not know quite what to make of this topic. In my case I own around 200 Japanese Go books. Of course there are many drill books but the majority are typical books aimed at amateur... book buyers. Let's face it, publishers do not care about theories of learning, they care about selling books! Your average book buyer in Japan is not looking for materials to support an organized, 50-hour per week study program. They are looking for the quick fix that will help them beat Sato-san at the office over lunch. They buy the colorful titles that promise to reveal the secrets of top-level play by the big names in five easy chapters. That is why those titles dominate the displays in bookstores: Yamashita on fighting, Takao on thickness, Cho Chikun on counting, and Takemiya on anything he wants to write about. Tami has reported on a number of such books in recent months and has captured what they are like quit well. Currently MYCOM seems like the most aggressive publisher in Go space and they are very much into the celebrity + strategic theme formula. Never forget that regardless of how many strong Asian players you see on the servers, the vast majority of Go books are bought by us typical duffers with a little time on our hands and a little money burning a hole in our pockets. We are interested in the stuff that dreams are made of, not more drills!

Is 200 the number of books required to reach 6dan? I thought my library of 50 Go books was sufficient.

Looks like I have a long way to go..

HermanHiddema wrote:I think that, in general, eastern teaching differs from western teaching in at least these two important ways.
1. Eastern teaching focusses much more on teaching from authority. Westerners are much more likely to ask "why?" when presented with an answer to their question, whereas easterners take the answer as a given, based on the authority of the teacher.
2. Eastern teaching focusses more on examples and repetition. Do 1000 tsumego, rather than learning tsumego principles.

I think that, for go, teaching by example and repetition is more likely to be successful in increasing your playing strength than teaching from principles. Why? Because 90% of playing strength is reading strength, and 90% of reading strength is pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is something our brains do very well, but it is not based on principles. Repetition trains your pattern recognition, therefore it works.

Westerners, however, often dislike this approach, because they want to feel that they understand moves. They therefore often prefer teaching based on principles, proverbs, and checklists.

If you are writing for a western audience, then I think attempting to explain things from principles is a good idea. Not because it gives better progress in playing strength, but because your readers prefer it, and are more likely to like and recommend your book, and hence increase your sales.

For a western audience, it is also less important that a book is written by a pro, because there is less focus on teaching from authority, hence authority is not as important. Easterners put far more value on the strength (and hence level of authority) of the author than a western audience does.

badukJr wrote:Do you have a source that Westerns ask 'why?' more than Asians when presented with a problem?

badukJr wrote:For both Asian and Westerners, the ones who avoided asking 'why?' almost always did so because they didn't want to appear stupid.

lemmata wrote:

badukJr wrote:Do you have a source that Westerns ask 'why?' more than Asians when presented with a problem?

One of Yilun Yang's books say that, in Asia, whenever he taught something, the students would only say "Yes, teacher". He says that he felt compelled to write a book for a Western audience because he was always being asked "Why?" by his students after coming to the US.

There has been a great deal of convergence of cultures over the years. When I was in elementary school in Korea, I reported to the principal that my teacher was was beating other students and swearing at them (I felt confident because I read some law books on my dad's bookshelf). The principal ratted me out to her and she stopped teaching for three days so that she could beat me in front of the class instead of teaching. If that happened today, she would have been fired because teachers are no longer allowed to use corporal punishment in Korean schools.

The gap between Western and Eastern cultures is shrinking everyday, but there are still generations of people in Asia who grew up in a different culture than the currently prevailing one.

badukJr wrote:For both Asian and Westerners, the ones who avoided asking 'why?' almost always did so because they didn't want to appear stupid.

That's true, but some of the older Asians may also have been beaten as children when they were too persistent with their questions.

ez4u wrote:

rpchuang wrote:Is 200 the number of books required to reach 6dan? I thought my library of 50 Go books was sufficient.

Looks like I have a long way to go..

I said that I own them, not that I had read them. If I had carefully studied all 200, who knows where I could be!

badukJr wrote:Exactly 0 of the young researchers have been old Asians, due to logic.

lemmata wrote:That's true, but some of the older Asians may also have been beaten as children when they were too persistent with their questions.

rpchuang wrote:Is 200 the number of books required to reach 6dan? I thought my library of 50 Go books was sufficient.

Looks like I have a long way to go..

billywoods wrote:Also true of Westerners. I hear plenty of stories of people even in my parents' generation being terrified to ask what I would consider reasonable questions for fear of assault. The definition of "older" is a little different, of course, but I'm not convinced that the learning attitudes were so different, say, 40 years ago.

Bonobo wrote:This goes way OT now but I just want to mention that, when I (*1957) was a child, corporal punishment was normal—in Germany!—at least in my family and all families I knew at that time. No days without slap and no week without some harder beating on the butt with a stick, ruler, or a wooden cooking spoon.