Hi everyone. I have made some lessons for beginners and posting it at this site: http://mwagolessons.wordpress.com/

Your comments most welcome.

Thank you.

First impression:

I'd love to see an easy way to navigate back and forth through the lessons (a set of "previous/next lesson" links are either missing or hard to find).

I'll let you know what I think of the material once I take a look through it.

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for your comment. This is a good one. I have tried to do this but since the site is essentially a blog, I am unsure how I can do this easily, perhaps by hyperlinking each post. But for navigation, I put in on the side panel a table of contents for easy access. Perhaps I should make this table of content the landing page instead?

Many thanks again.

I liked very much what I read so far.
After browsing through it, I realized this was the Malaysian Go Association and I remember reading a very nicely made powerpoint by this association which I enjoyed very much. You've definitely gained a new reader.

For those who would want to start from the first post, here is the link: http://mwagolessons.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/

I went through these posts a few days ago. Your goal seems slightly inconsistent, though. At times, it seems that you are aiming at complete beginners, and at other times it seems like you're aiming at more sophisticated players.

-- You jump into fairly complicated semeai's and tsumego before introducing basic concepts that beginners won't know. (What concepts? Maybe other people will think I'm being stupid, but I would start with atari, extending from atari, nets, ladders, pushing, hane'ing, cutting, jumping, eyes, and some basic ideas about how to use stones efficiently in different parts of the board.)
-- You tend to give a problem that requires you to know a tesuji, and then introduce the tesuji in the solution to the problem. This is brutal on beginners! They'll either develop a habit of looking directly at the solutions without bothering to try the problem, or they'll get very frustrated.
-- Eight lessons on joseki for beginners seems like a lot. The ideas are good - I like that you're focusing on guiding ideas rather than encouraging them to memorize branches - but 12 fundamentals is a lot for a beginner to remember and internalize. Since many (all?) of the fundamentals are actually go fundamentals rather than joseki fundamentals, it might makes sense to introduce them one at a time, and trust that the people reading the lessons will apply them in the corner.

In your solutions to the tsumego you do a really great job going over all the different variations, even ones that stronger players will think are silly; I think this is useful for beginners. The material in all the posts seems pretty good, but I prefer the crisp, focused tone in the earlier lessons to the more garrulous tone in the new posts.

This is just my impression! I hope these suggestions don't sound harsh - I'm sure my ideas about how beginners should learn go have more to do with how I learned go than with the objective order of things.

Hi!

Many thanks for your feedback and encouragement. We shall endeavor to improve the lessons. Here are some answers to the questions raised.

The lessons on the site is meant to help the player once they have studied and gone through the Module A study pack (downloadable from the Materials Download section on the right panel). They will have to go through that pack first.

On the Joseki, I was hoping to get the player away from the fixation of memorizing joseki which is really very common. The introduction is a bit long but I think it is quite worth doing it since we can refer to them when we discuss the joseki later, and also to impress to the player that one should not memorize the joseki but seek to understand the moves. I hope the player can go through the materials slowly and without rush.

Eventually, we will compile this into book form, which will be re-edited to suit a presentation on a book instead of the casual chatting sytle as in a blog post

Again, many thanks for your feedback. Appreciate it very much.