Simba wrote: I just started playing go 3 days ago, and was wondering what the best way for a beginner to improve is?
For now, play lots and lots of games is best, asking questions about things you don't understand (e.g. in this forum's review section, or the KGS teaching ladder).
In general, life and death problems in great numbers are generally accepted to be best for pure improvement. I generally recommend doing whatever you enjoy studying, on the basis that this doesn't seem like work and so is the most fun way to improve, but if you're absolutely fixated on maximum improvement then tsumego is the way forward.
Quote: I got 'Many Faces of Go' and have been playing the 18kyu and 15kyu opponents on that, both of whom I can beat comfortably. I presume they are not actually anywhere close to 18k/15k level as far as humans are concerned since I'm most likely 30k myself since I just started.
Ranks like this are hard to quantify. Particularly in computer cases, where a weak player can learn fairly simple tactics to beat a nominally much stronger computer player. Unfortunately, these tactics are not generally good against humans, so you learn bad habits. For improvement, it is a much better idea to play on KGS, which has a good number of beginners and lots of friendly helpful people.
Quote: Today I did ~650 exercises on 321Go, but I'm not quite sure how useful this is. Will doing all of these exercises help me improve a ton? Or is there a better way?
Again, for now, play lots of games. In general these sorts of problems are good though, certainly if you enjoy doing them.
Quote: Also, I was wondering how applicable are doing exercises to improving in a 'real game'? Will I just learn to spot patterns in real games where I can exploit my opponent based on having seen a very similar situation in an exercise? When I was working hard on chess, I could do the tactics puzzles very easily in books, but it was many, many times more difficult to spot them in actual games (since I never really knew when to look). I've submitted one game I played to the 'Go Teaching Ladder' (the first game I ever played!) to hopefully get some feedback but I've not heard back from them - do they refuse to review some games?
Spotting patterns is a good part of things, because even non-identical patterns may have similar shapes and vital poitns that you can instinctively recognise. I think shape is a much bigger concept in Go than in chess (and can be more instinctively internalised), but it will always be true that spotting things on the board is harder  . Doing tsumego also trains your general ability to read out situations (pruning the search tree, keeping moves in your head, reading deeper sequences etc.), which is something involved in every single move of every single game without being tied to the specifics of the problem.
Doing the problems is undoubtedly of great benefit if improvement is your goal, though is not necessary to improve to a fairly high level, albeit possibly slower.
The GTL don't refuse to review games as far as I know, but it can be a very slow system. I recommend the 'KGS teaching ladder' or 'beginners' rooms on KGS, where peopel will look at games and answer questions for you. The review and study sections on this forum are also very good.
Quote: Also, is it feasible for a complete beginner to reach shodan level in 1 year or less if he works hard? My country's go association has a 'shodan challenge' on their website where they encourage weak players to try to get to shodan in a year. Is this feasible? 1d corresponds to around 2000 ELO from what I've seen on histograms, and I know someone going from being a complete chess novice to ~2000 ELO in a year would be pretty difficult! Thanks a lot for any advice - much appreciated  .
Shodan in one year is very feasible, with study, or even without much study in some cases. Assuming you're in the UK, the shodan challenge isn't strictly about reaching shodan, but at improving to a level chosen by the player at the beginning. Shodan is a fine goal, but don't get hung up about it - if nothing else, frustration will make improvement even harder! Shodan is probably a bit easier to reach than 2000 chess ELO, from what I can tell.
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). Might try a 19x19 on there later if I can find a 28-30k player.