The following differences are typical, but there are exceptions. Besides, part of the Asian professional teachers having taught in Western countries have, at some time, learnt to modify their teaching style to better meet the demands of Western players.

Asian professional teachers:
- they are very fast at reading, problem solving and difficult problem presenting
- when asked for reasons or their own thinking, their answers are weak or even "I do not know"

Western teachers like Asian professional teachers:
- part of the Western teachers is very similar to Asian professional teachers

Western teaching with Western teaching style:
- they are significantly to much slower at reading, problem solving and difficult problem presenting
- they can explain much in terms of reasoning or their own thinking

I'd like to know the source of this data:
- On how many Asian professionals is the conclusion based?
- What % of Asian go professionals, during the course of a paid lecture/class were asked about the reasons of a move were unable to answer in a satisfactory manner?
- Which were the criteria to evaluate if the answer was satisfactory? (in the cases where there actually was one).
- Was in all the cases the paid lecture/class in the native language of the professional?

I think the main difference is pattern recognition kind of thinking (so called "intuition") vs discursive (argumentation, reasoning, logical implications etc) way of thinking. It's kind of East vs West philosophy at the most basic level.
There can be more "vs" examples, and among them technique vs theory is most important I think. It is because western players hope that theory and explaining a game by terms and definitions will improve their play. I think this is a wrong way.

Go is about reading and pattern recognition (local, global - doesn't matter, it is still pattern recognition) and these skills need to be trained through solving tesujis, tsumegos and playing games. Westerners thinks that having a deep understanding of rules and explaining everything in a discursive way is the key. I don't think so. The key is to train your technique of playing not a reasons to do so, and Asian kind of training is focused mostly on tsumego/tesuji and games. Not theory.
I think it is obvious for Asians. Of course if you want to be a teacher you should know how to express your intuition and how to make generalizations of your knowledge, but a player need to read correctly when playing, not to construct a theory about his actual game.

Asian trainers just expect from pupils to be much more trained in reading, and in a meantime westerners wants just a shortcut :"don't push me to do next 1000 tsumego, just give me a theory that solves it all!".
Well, I can say that this way of thinking is pointless. Pattern recognition skills needed to play go is not something to be achievable through discursive way of learning/teaching. The game of go can be described in a deep way but the game itself has no depth, it's patterns versus patterns.
Western players attitude is like: "I need a teacher, he will explain it all to me", and Asian approach is more focused on personal hard work.

This all above are only my hypothesis, so if you disagree with all written above try to argue in a kind and logical way or just deal with it to make world simpler. Thanks.

[edited some typos]

I partially agree with this one.

Most Asian go players including the professionals learn go mainly by their own experience, and with support of various example books. This way, it is hard to develop skills to explain their thoughts, or it's easy to think useless of doing this. I was amazed a lot when I saw the comments of the Malkovich game players.


Exactly!

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I've never had a teacher, professional or otherwise, so I can't really speak to the differences in teaching styles or methods, but I do often wonder about the premise of the question, which is that Westerners - both teachers and students - think about the game differently than their Asian born and bred counterparts.

Having spent half my life in a culture different than that in which I was born, I can testify to the fact that culture affects our views on a wide variety of topics. Among these topics is "what is the best way to learn/teach?"

I'm not going to claim that there is necessarily any agreement within a specific culture as to what is best, but rather that there are a greater number of factors which influence an individual's opinion that are shared within one culture than are shared between two separate ones. Furthermore, these factors, such as upbringing, media exposure, history, religious/philosophically based values etc., can have more or less in common with each other in various cultures depending on the extent of language barriers, cultural exchange, geographical distance etc.

It's also worth noting that opinions on such matters are not necessarily static within one culture. Fashions change and techniques are modified - partly due to contact with other cultures perceived as being able to do something better.

What was the question again? Oh, yeah. What are the differences between Asian professional teachers and Western ones? It would be nice to hear some people who have some experience with both tell us what they think. If it's indeed the case that Western teachers are better at explaining their thinking than their Asian Professional counterparts, and the corollary, that Western students demand such reasoning and Asian students are better at doing what they're told, it's also worth asking if we in the West are stuck on the wrong track, i.e., our tendency to get bogged down explaining and understanding is getting in the way of simply doing things right, or whether we're simply on a train that hasn't yet reached it's destination.

I'm inclined to believe the latter, and at the same time I'm convinced that the best way to teach go to Westerners is something that is in the process of naturally evolving.

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I have posted a reply in another thread which is also relevant to this one. I won't repeat it here, to prevent further fragmentation of this discussion.

@HermanHiddema - we wrote almost exactly same posts

Yes, they make the same basic point. I could've just liked your post instead of writing mine, had I noticed it before.

IMX, no, except that there are a lot of Asian pros who are not very good at teaching.



There is some research (in the West) that indicates that adults learn better through explanation. It is a mistake to think that teaching methods that work well for one group work well for another. IMO, how insei learn go may be good for Western children who aspire to become pros, but may not be good for others.

That said, learning theory does not necessarily improve one's play. You can see something similar with language learning. Learning the grammar of a foreign language does not make you fluent in that language.

The field of go pedagogy is wide open, especially in the West. In 2014 I would be willing to do some research, if someone will pay me a lot of money.

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Alguien, from 1991 to today, I have seen between 100 and 300 different professional players teaching at real world events or me personally. Most of them were teaching publicly at demonstration boards for many or at go boards for individual players and were a) invited by an event organisation or a go association or sent by a go association or b) came on their own initiative to do Western players a favour.

Details about payments for such public events are rarely available clearly for everybody, but much more often than not serious rumours circulate that the professionals get all or significant parts of their travel expenses paid and part of the professionals also get payments for their actual teaching. Such payments appear to come from Asian go associations, sponsors, event organisations, Western go associations or event participants. In Europe, the usual mode of payment for professionals at public events is indirectly. (IIRC, this is different in the USA?)

Among those professionals, when I asked them for reasons or their thinking, two types of professionals must be distinguished: 1) being still unfamiliar with frequency of Western questions for reasoning and thinking, 2) having adapted their teaching style to some extent to such Western questions. Mostly the regularly coming professionals could change to type (2), but by far not all of them did change. If a professional changed his teaching, then usually only after several years of attempts. E.g., Saijo (every year at the European Go Congress) needed about 7 years to change his teaching towards (2) to a significant degree, but was still having great difficulties with teaching advanced topics in terms of reasoning and thinking.

For type (1) professionals (public or private teaching), only about 5% ~ 10% could answer with reasoning or explaining their thinking so that I would say that the answers were better than weak, when viewed in terms of reasoning or thinking. (JFTR, tactically WRT reading, the answers were usually strong.) A typical answer for how they think to come to a conclusion would be "I do not understand my thinking; I use intuition." or proverb level ("To kill, first reduce from the outside, then play the vital point." - Note: the converse can easily be true.) or "I do not know." or "Please ask a real question!".

Criteria: For me the criterion is: Does the teaching actually teach me something? Does the teaching enable me to apply it in all related positions of all my games or only in exactly the same shape / local position used during the teaching?

Language: Part was in the professional's native language and then translated, part was in English or (rarely) German. In almost all cases, translators were available where necessary. Everything described above presumes that language or translation difficulties did not exist or were already surmounted.

lobotommy, Herman, gowan, importance / necessity of teaching / learning by examples and technique versus theory and principles will be a good topic for later threads. Type (1) professionals use much less theory than type (2) professionals or Western amateurs used to teaching (also) theory.

I disagree with the idea that it would take countless games for go theory (taught by a teacher and absorbed by a pupil) to be applied by intuition / subconscious thinking / fast analytical thinking. Maybe it takes countless games for the whole of all go theory. However, this is not how teachers teach. They do not lecture the whole, let the pupil listen for months or years, then wait for the pupil to apply. Rather, those teachers teaching go theory (instead of "intuitive samples" in the "Asian style") teach specific topics or aspects of go theory (such as "play in big rather than small regions") and then let the pupil need a few (or, in case of a slowly learning pupil, several) games to learn application. A few (or several) - not countless!

This what Yun Yeong-seon 8p, who teaches here in Germany, says on the matter:

"When I first came here I didn’t have much experience in teaching, especially teaching Europeans. The relationship between teacher and student is very different here, and it took me some time to adapt to it.
Students will always ask for a detailed explanation of why a move is good, while in Korea they would just accept it for the time being, try it out for themselves and come back to the teacher with their experiences.
I really can’t say which is better. Asking to gain more insights into a move is good, but sometimes I feel that exploring the details of a move by yourself leads to a deeper understanding and the results tend to be remembered better. The right way is probably somewhere in the middle, and for this reason I enjoy the exchange with my students very much."

http://www.wbaduk.com/news/news_view.asp?news_no=243

The second (bold) part is often left out when describing differences between asien and western teaching - makes it easier to understand (for me). Thanks for sharing.

I think aside from cultural difference, it's very important to consider the fact that most westerners learn go for the first time as adults, while most asian players learn as children.

Children learn very fast by example. Their brain is developping and they can assign whole areas to new topics. Adults are more stuck in their way and need roundabout ways to use their already structured brain for new things. For example if you put a toddler in a new country, and he learns a new language, then what happens in the brain is entirely different of what happens if you put an adult in a new country and make him learn the language. And in the same conditions of learning the result will be different.

Adults learning a new topic need to make connections whith existing reasoning structures that they have. No matter how hard they work they will never get the same result from tsumego and replaying games than children. To keep with the language comparison, a child will learn the use of words just by listening and talking, without having a single idea what syntax and grammar is supposed to be. But adults will need those supporting structures to make more sense of what they learn. If you leave adult migrants alone and let them try to join conversations, they will learn somehow, but very bad, while kids will be fluents in a matter of months.

A german will be able to tell me that I employed a word in the wrong context or my sentence sounds weird but he may be entirely unable to provide an explanation why this is so. In many cases I may know more german grammar than many of my german friends, actually. But they still talk german better than me because it's their mother tongue. And no matter how hard I work, I will always have an accent. I expect it will be the same with go. In my game too, I will always have "an accent".

This post is something of an epiphany for me. I began learning Go at 23 years old and, as any adult can attest, learning it as an adult is more difficult than learning it as a child - and especially in a country (US of A) where most people have not even heard of Go, much less have seen a Go board and stones. Growing up close to an international airport, I learned a lot about aircraft from when I was a young child, so I have internalized many aviation-related bits of information - enough to allow me to have a discussion with almost anyone working in aviation-related jobs.

In my experiences in learning foreign languages, I find that devoting lots of time and effort to learning the grammar and other information - especially cultural - needed to speak the language, combined with constant practice of their application, helps me eventually to know enough to communicate in my target language. This is easier when one is in contact with persons who learned it as children; in the 10 years that I have been studying Japanese, contact with native speakers of this language has allowed me to develop enough understanding of it to conduct even mildly complex conversations therein. I'm not yet at the level where I can, for example, converse with a scholar, but I have progressed beyond elementary school level in Japanese. And I would be able to come close to complete fluency if I had opportunities to communicate in Japanese on a daily basis, but since I do not live in Japan nor live in any close proximity to a community of Japanese expatriates, my Japanese skills are often allowed to lapse.

On the other hand, I live in an American city with a large population of Spanish speakers and I even learned Spanish as a child, so I am able to speak Spanish on a daily basis with little difficulty.

I think the greatest difference aren't the teaching methods/teachers, but the students, when I watch lectures on youtube from asian professionals at a western congress people are just asking sooooo much, it is so annoying imo, so so annoying.

I mean it is like they aren't even trying to think/read themselves but just asking for askings sake, like they somehow learned if they don't understand something they just have to ask, before even trying to think for themselves. Propably I am alone with that, but I for hell know that if I would go to a congress I wouldn't ask such nonsense questions I for sure know I can answer them myself, when I try the variations out at home. And imo the asian teachers aren't accustomed to such helpless behaviour, especially from grown ups.

"Wouldn't it be possible/better/ if X places his stone at Y?" "What happens if XY does XYZ?" etc. rofl

Or maybe I am just too young, no idea.

I agree with this observation.

I think there is a huge emphasis on asking questions early rather than reflecting on the problem and striving for a solution without help ("there is no such thing as a stupid question", etc).

I also see this in practically every forum ever made (people will ask the same question that has been asked by countless others, without first having tried to solve it on their own, eg, by using that very forum's search function to see if the question had been asked before).

On slightly another issue:
Do we know or have we proven that Go theory in the sense we understand it even exists at high(er) levels?

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