how much is expected from the reader in terms of understanding what the book is saying?

basically, i am studying a few things where i see a lot, "x is good here" and sometimes they follow up on it and show why and sometimes they don't. from what i've heard about the problem with beginners learning joseki is that they memorize the moves but don't understand it which is why there is that saying that learning joseki drops you two stones or something. to be clear im not learning joseki, but i feel the same must apply to other parts of go as well. for example, when i read "x is good here" and i am not explained why, i will maybe make that move, but i won't understand why it's a good move and that lack of understanding will make it hard for me to follow up successfully eventually turning what should have been a good move into a bad move.

so back to my original question, is it expected of me to almost take that line that "x is good here" and work it out like its a tsumego problem so that i understand it better? it seems like thats going to be helpful but i don't know if at my point in my development if i will be able to work out such a move whose answers i cannot confirm... or maybe its better to approach it like i am being given the answer and then asked to challenge it from the other side and see why i fail at doing so? but again, it might be an influence move which i don't know anything about so i might accidentally put together a shape that proves the value of the move but not be able to see why?

just wondering what you guys think about this.

Just thinking about it and trying to understand it will further your abilities. Try to grasp ideas and principles, most of the time you can get that out of a book even though you can't really follow the variations.

Almost certainly not. Why? Because if the author could have demonstrated that a position was good by a tsumego like sequence, he would have done so.

I ran into this problem when I studies joseki as a 2 dan. (There is no rush to study joseki.) If it is not clear why a result is good or bad, think about it. Try it out in games.

BTW, when I first started studying go books, the books were in Japanese and my
Japanese was not very good. So I mainly looked at the pictures. I later discovered that some of the results that I thought were good were failure diagrams. I can't say that that held me back much.

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Everything with love. Stay safe.

Some books are simply better than others, and some better than others for certain readers.

There aren't a heck of a lot of books that I think beginners can be expected to understand categorically. The "Learn To Play Go" is quite clear, and there are others.

Aside from advice given by others already in this thread, an option for the situation you describe is to set up the book position on a board (or in a sandbox on kaya.gs, which would enable you to get more eyes on the problem) and try out the suggested "good" and "bad" options to see why.

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The reader of a joseki book is typically not expected to be a beginner. Don't take this the wrong way - the reader is not really expected to be 4 kyu either. I know low-mid dan level players who don't understand joseki very well. It's just really hard. I recommend the YouTube channel 'weiqimaster' - he uploads lots of very good, mostly joseki-based, videos, and explains them very clearly tsumego-style. (But even then I don't recommend it until you're 15 kyu or stronger, and the stronger you are the more you'll get out of it.)


Generally, if an author says "this is good", sufficiently strong players are expected to be able to just see it. (Part of the process of getting stronger involves developing good intuition for what is good and what is bad.) What "sufficiently strong" means is difficult to define, but if you want an anecdotal milestone: it was only at around 6 kyu that I started to find non-beginner books readable. It was only at around 12-15 kyu that I started to find a book marked "25-30 kyu" approachable. Don't be too disheartened - these books are written by people who scarcely have an idea of what a beginner is.

Not that I wish to start an argument in an irrelevant thread, but I am going to go ahead and recommend KGS as well as kaya here. (I think it's rather brazen to plug the new server that has barely any members and deliberately omit the infinitely more popular one - the aim in this thread is to help a beginner, after all, and at this stage in kaya's development, beginners will find more help on KGS.)

It's not brazen to not list every option. Beginner-friendly communities are easily found on both servers.

I *am* a beginner, 23k on both servers.

If we're going to nitpick each other (not recommended practice) I could say that it's rather brazen to misuse "infinitely" in a sentence exposed to the public. Please be nice.

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Central Mississippi Go Club
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"Friendly" is not the salient point. If you prefer concrete numbers: at the time of writing this post, kaya has about 50 users online (about 60% of which are idle), KGS's English Game Room alone has about 1000 (about 30% of which are idle). KGS has been established for many years, kaya is still in beta testing/development and giving out very limited numbers of accounts. And their review tools are much the same. *shrugs* I don't care if you prefer kaya over KGS knowing these facts, but I do think it's brazen not to give these facts. At the moment, one server is clearly better than the other, and any beginner (including the OP or others reading) making a choice between them should know the difference between them. Anyway, having given the difference between them, I'm going to retire from this thread so as not to clutter it up.

My only aim was to suggest a way to make use of a book when it gave only "this is good for black".

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Central Mississippi Go Club
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