I read the link before anyone replies were posted here, and I thought it was excellent. Being very familiar with taiji I recognised every aspect the author wrote about and agreed with him completely. The only caveat I had was that he was maybe asking for trouble by using both "basics" and "fundamentals", even though he himself carefully distinguished them in a sensible way.

When I returned to this thread I was astonished. I honestly thought most posters had either not read the article carefully or had read something else. I also thought some people were wilfully imposing their own definitions of basic and fundamental, even reversing the original author's intended meaning. I also thought some posters were perhaps trying too hard to make the connection with go, and were getting confused by counting what the martial artist calls "applications" as basics or fundamentals.

I think there is a connection with go, but possibly the use of "basics" and "fundamentals" is obscuring it.

When you learn a martial art of the oriental type, you will first learn what is called a "form" (or kata). This would be the "basics" in the OP. All you will learning is to put your body and limbs in more or less the right positions. You will not be able to use these moves in a fight.

Under an oriental teacher, you will then re-learn that form (or, more usually, part of it) repeatedly with different twists. This would be the "fundamentals". In taiji, you would learn to make the moves with the right breathing, then in another cycle with the right yin-yang, then in yet another cycle with the right waist movements, and so on. Most of your time is spent on this. At first you will still not be able to use these moves in a fight, but the teacher will occasionally show you how they might work in an application. You will then start to understand the reason for adding each fundamental idea to each basic shape. Eventually you may learn the fundamentals so well that you can apply them to an application instantly in a fight situation.

If you get that far you may be allowed to do weapon forms with e.g. a sword. Here the idea is not so much to learn to be a fencer, but rather to do the hands-only form with an extra weight added. This strengthens your limbs but can also expose weaknesses in your posture or balance, in which case you go back and study the hands-only fundamentals again.

It is typical of western students to learn the basic shapes, then to want to skip the fundamentals and get straight into the applications, or better still the light sabres. As the original article says, there are too many McDojo "fast-food" teachers in the west who pander to that.

Returning to go, my take on the equivalence is this: visualise the joseki where black has a star stone, white approaches with a knight's move, Black plays kosumitsuke against it, White extends up to the fourth line and then Black plays a one-space jump on the other side of the star stone. Learning to parrot this sequence of moves is what is meant by "basics", or the initial form. But it is not very useful to you until you also learn the fundamentals. Among the fundamentals are that this shape is not meant to defend the corner, because it is riddled with weaknesses - e.g. the 3-3 point, the 5-3 point, the 8-3 point. Once you learn these fundamentals you start to understand that this Black shape is for attack not defence, and eventually you become able to use powerfully it as an application.

I am not aware of any special terms in go that cover each aspect of this, but what is meant by the fundamentals is usually covered by what the Japanese call the "meaning" of a move (or shape). Also, the emphasis on handicap games and handicap josekis is part of this process of passing on the fundamentals.

For those not familiar with martial arts, there's an easy demonstration that will probably work for you. Stand up straight (the basic shape), and get somebody to push you gently from the side. If you have mastered the fundamentals (feet slightly apart and parallel, head erect, etc) and so are standing with good posture, he will not move you. But if you stand straight except for tilting your head to one side (bad posture), you should find that you an easy pushover. If you practise all the fundamentals enough, you will be able to stand in a room in such a way that your presence is felt without you moving, as well as breathing better and avoiding back problems, etc.

What is this toothpaste technique you speak of?

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

wineandgolover, perhaps this one.

Basic: a broken shape is when you allow your opponent to push through a small gap separating your groups.

Fundamental: Broken shapes hamper you ability to fight effectively, and while planning one's moves, one should look for sequences that don't give your opponent the opportunity to break your shape.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Handicaps... Look ma I'm playing the pink fluffy bunny Fuseki!

I think the best part of the article is the term "McDojo," which I hadn't heard before. People complain a lot about lack of popularity of go in the West, but if it were very popular, it would be profitable to create McDojos. There seems to be less mystique in go. I've never run into a go teacher that pretended that they could become invisible, for example. (Maybe if you pay ahead of time for lessons they will try, though. )