I often prefer to ask strong players why other specific moves are bad when I don't really understand their explanation of why a particular move is good. For whatever reason, people seem to be better at explaining why bad moves are bad than they are at explaining why good moves are good.

On the why question, I think that we are getting hung up on the semantics, and ignoring the social aspects. For one thing, I don't think that we can lump the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese together in terms of social norms. When I was living in Japan, Why? was often a challenge to provide justification. If a stronger player said, "You should have played here," without explanation, one might reply, "If I had played there, . . ." to get an explanation, which was usually a variation or two. Or one might simply say, "I don't understand." Such replies invite the teacher to explain, but do not challenge them.

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At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
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Visualize whirled peas.

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I do remember a why question about go. Takemiya was playing in a Sunday TV match and Ishida Yoshio was the main commentator. The lower level pro asked Ishida why Takemiya had not played a joseki move, and Ishida replied, "Maybe he forgot."

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

There was a thread a while back about the quality of teachers, and an example that go brought up was Kitani (who as I understand rarely played his pupils, and generally didn't do "instruction" at his school). The comparison was made (by John F. I believe) that many professional go teachers would perhaps be better classified as a go trainer. I think a teacher is generally framed as someone who will work to provide a lesson for a pupil (emphasis on the actions of the teacher) as opposed to a trainer who will develop a program of work the student must do to build their own skills (emphasis on the actions of the student). In that sense, if you are training knowing "why" may not necessarily be intrinsically helpful. If you have a personal trainer who says "Ok, you need to run 5 miles and then do 50 push-ups" to which you respond "why?" learning why is not going to get you any closer to your goal of being physically fit, it's the process of running the 5 miles and doing the 50 push-ups that will do that. In the same vein "work these problems, study these games" knowing why doesn't necessarily get you any closer to having put in effort of working the problems and studying the games.

I will change the "in a culture where learning is meant to occur through osmosis" for "in a culture where learning is meant to occur through observation and imitation"...

Usually in japanese culture the want you to discover the proper way rather than explaning it directly, due a sum of factors: complexsity of the process, better abstraction, multiple approach are valid, based in unexplicable intuitive knowledge... and of course, becouse it lead to less arguing/fighting between theacher and student (even in a good philosophical)... wich we westeners love but they have a terrific fobia to it.


Asking directely "Why?" regards a lot of matters to a japanese is one of the most frustrating activities that you can do... an it has a huge chance to getting a complete useless response, it is not rude, unless you asked stubbornly (what is stubbornly my depend the culture, the person, the way and tone of asking, etc..). Belive me, lot of the fighting with my japanese girlfriend are precisely becouse my western and scientific mind ask a lot of "Whys".

So a better approch is to ask them indirectly, by proposing examples plus your answers and explaining the reasoning that lead you to them. They will tell you "Yes" (Caution: Not necesarely correct, the only answer, or perfect) or "No" (More informative, becouse the usually give you the reason, and the correct answer).

It is a lot like playing to battleship, where the yeses are "Touched!" and the noes stands for "Water!", and you need to guess the idea (ships positions and lenghts) by your own means.


EDIT: Is like Bill Spight says, seems that it took me a long while to write my post

It's interesting that you feel this way. I would suspect that there are advantages to either teaching method described: that of explicit knowledge being delivered through inquisition, and that of implicit learning through guidance and support.

I agree that there are bad teachers of both types, and that you always need to be careful when selecting a teacher. When the teaching style you seek is explicit knowledge transfer, the important thing to look for in a teacher is one who can explain things in terms that you yourself find easy to understand. This might not be the same from one student to the next. For instance, Robert may find Teacher X is explaining things poorly for him, while Teacher Y is doing a much better job of answering his questions. I may find the opposite is true for myself.

As for the other style of teaching, where the teacher is there to offer guidance and support, it is more important for the teacher to be motivating to you, I think. This would ideally drive you to flesh out your own ideas and observations with self study, while the teacher provides you with new ideas and observations that you may not have thought of yourself without that bit of guidance.

I tend to respond better to the latter style of teaching, rather than by asking a lot of questions and having specific details explained to me verbally or through visual aids. Don't get me wrong, I think a combination of the two styles is best when learning something deep and complex. However, I've always found that with complex ideas and subjects it is very hard to ask GOOD questions, and even harder to find teachers who can answer them in ways that I can easily understand. I've always found I learned so much more by doing things myself and experiencing. Teachers who have impacted me most in life have not impacted me by dumping detailed knowledge in my lap ... rather they have provided the opportunities for me to experience challenges and situations which I would have found difficult to engage in without their help and guidance. This is not just for Go (I haven't really had any teachers for Go, beyond some SDK players on KGS when I was DDK), but in academics as well.

I was once told (second-hand) that "how to teach go" is a topic of both study and research at Myoungji University in Korea. Given the lively discussion here, many of us would be interested in finding out what the people there think about this topic. Does anyone here have access to what they're doing over there?

I believe courses and descriptions are listed online. if i recall though, the courses are not only about getting stronger but about baduk history and culture, too.

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be immersed

I once attended a classical guitar workshop led by a fantastic world-class performer.

Someone asked him: "How do you play so fast?"

"Uhhh.... like this" *plays a really fast melody*

Reminds me of that anecdote about a composer (Beethoven?) who had just played a sonata (?) for a visitor (?), who then asked the composer about the meaning of what he just had played, to which the composer replied by going back to his piano and playing exactly the same piece again

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Hmmm, very Zen.

- When I was living in Japan, Why? was often a challenge to provide justification. If a stronger player said, "You should have played here," without explanation, one might reply, "If I had played there, . . ." to get an explanation, which was usually a variation or two. Or one might simply say, "I don't understand." Such replies invite the teacher to explain, but do not challenge them.

I'm reminded of Feynman at Princeton, and Los Alamos, where he was liked because he actually would challenge an idea on its own merits, and not defer authority to an Oppenheimer or Einstein. Sometimes people wanted to bounce ideas off one another, and far too many people were scared to question people because of their stature.

Not quite the same with a neophyte and an expert, but sometimes answers are wrapped up in their *causes* and their *purposes*.

There isnt that much problem in chess though, where some annotations or notes usually reflect a lot of the 'why' or interesting positions. And I think it's probably true with Kifu as well, where the whole point of the commentary is to show some explanations and justifications for stuff.

Maybe just personal instruction, and casual commentary on games, has all that baggage, some of it cultural.

One thing i remember seeing with chess with club players going through games with beginners, and showing weak and strong moves, is that sometimes they were wrong 50% of the time... Sometimes the beginners had good ideas which were poopoohed by the higher ups, and sometimes the recommendations from 'authority' were tactically unsound... But with a game score and computer analysis and making notes of people's comments from both sides, you can definately get an 'eye-opener' on how sometimes, advice from stronger players wasnt all that great, unless you had people who were candidate masters, or you really really looked at a game slowly and thoroughly... [and yes computers are great at correcting anyone's analysis]

I also see a similiarity with the focus of some on tsumego, just like some in chess always force things down to 'tactics'. That you can't really do anything right till you get your tactical ability at an 1800 level player, and that will always trip you up. And you see different styles of teaching and training, like the Soviet School or some where you can get lots of drills with endgames and then a zillion tactical puzzlers and stuff.

I'm still not sure of the differences, with Western and Eastern go books, but I still think that annotated games with Kifu, definately do ask the whys... and there's a lot of magic bullet books for amateur players in japan [great ones and not so great ones].... And there does seem to be a lot of drill with life and death and tsumego, but i think the west is catching up pretty good.

If anything, the more that's translated, the better off things will be in the 'long term' for the game. And it's just as true for chess, there's lots in German that wasn't translated and still quite interesting, and a lot of the Soviet stuff was translated too. Fischer bit the bullet and got fluent in Russian for the information, damn the translators.. And well hopefully we'll see more Japanese go material from the 1930s to today, come out in english.. maybe..


And hows this for contrast, maybe the Japanese ask why more than the Koreans

- The Strongest Drills Aiming for the Top 1% (12 books) - Kien Books 2010-2011
[These books seem to originate from Korean baduk books published by Oromedia. Particularly the series ‘Top 1%’. Whereas the original Korean books are densely packed with problems and usually answers with just the main line, the Japanese versions seem to offer a lot more information with short explanations, variations and failures.]

and that series is useful for 3-Dan and higher... but the Japanese translation adds a ton of extra explanations...

why?

because people want to know why!