The text in Ishida`s book consists of two main elements: at the beginning of the chapter, he states the principles he wishes the reader to grasp; after that, there are theme diagrams in which you are asked to choose the correct continuation.

He is a further example of his writing:

p. 34

大場の見つけ方
大場は、次のポイントで見つけることができます。

地の接点が大きい

黒から打てば黒地が増え、逆に白から打てば白地が増えるところが大きく、「地の接点」といいます。本章は、「接点」を理解していただくことが一番の目的です。

両翼を意識する

1図のように、隅の構えから両方向にヒラク構えを、両翼といいます。非常に良い構えので、両翼を目指したり、相手の両翼を防ぐ手が大きいです。また、両翼とまではいえないまでも、全体の石が連係するように打つことも大切。

小ゲイマジマリの背中に注意！

小目の小ゲイマジマリは、「シマリの背中」の価値が高くなります。つまり、２図のほうに発展性があり、価値が高くなるのです。全体の配置によりますが、通常は a よりも黒１のほうが大きい手になります。

How to Find Big Points
The next theme is to be able to find big points.

The Meeting Point of Territories
A place where if played from Black would increase Black`s territory, or conversely where if played from White would increase White`s territory is big. It is called the "meeting point of territories". The most important aim of this chapter is that you grasp the meaning of such a "meeting point".

To be aware of the Double Wing
As in Fig. 1, extensions that add to a corner in both directions is called a "double wing". As it is an extremely good point, aiming at a double wing [of your own] and preventing the opponent`s is a big move. Further, although you cannot go so far as to [equate?] it to a double wing, to play to connect all your stones is also important.

Watch the Small Knight`s Enclosure`s Back!
With the small knight`s enclosure, the back [i.e., the extension in front of it] of the enclosure becomes very valuable. That is to say, to have the development shown in Fig. 2 is of high value. It depends on the overall position, but usually the [indicated] move is a bigger one than the play at "a" [the other extension].

There, you have several principles:

* A mutually big point is very big
* Making or preventing a double wing is very big
* Connecting your groups is very important
* Extending in front of the small knight`s enclosure is very big
* Depending on circumstances, extending in the other direction can also be big

In the chapter that follows this brief exposition, Ishida shows us how to apply these principles allowing for the tactical and strategic qualities of each theme position. Sometimes it`s easy to follow the principles, and at other times you have to make a more finely tuned judgement. While Ishida concentrates on these principles, he introduces more along the way, such as "Play so that the opponent cannot invade and make a two-space base" (actually stated as 黒の連係がよくなり、白から右辺のどこに入っても、二間にヒラク余地がありません - because Black`s connection [between corners] has become good, no matter where White comes in, there is no leeway for a two-space base).

So, what you don`t have is lots and lots of "micro-principles" to cover every conceivable situation. Neither is Ishida dogmatic, while he gives his guidelines for finding a big move, his examples show that you also have to judge each position on its merits.

To be sure, the principles listed above are not especially new to me, but it was good to be reminded of them and to have them illustrated deeply. That has improved my understanding. Moreover, the Ishida book also contains material that is new to me, such as the advice on when how to choose an approach move, and in some of the tesuji he shows in the variations.

Actually, if new principles and the like are of interest, then I think Mimura Tomoyasu`s book (三村流布石の虎の巻 Mimura-style Fuseki Bible) would be worth looking at, although I have no idea what interpretation you`d make of it without reading the text. As an example, but only one, I will provide this quotation: "The point of an `Attacking Fuseki` is that by expanding your moyo to a greater scale than your opponent you cause them to intrude first [so you can attack and consolidate], and, of course, the sanrensei being easy to expand is very powerful for this". For me, this is a big eye-opener, because in the past I have often constructed a moyo, thought of it as a springboard for invading my opponent, and been ripped up without profit in consequence. I`m happy now to have a book that explains how to be consistent, instead of simply telling you that you have to be consistent.

I have not read your book, yet, but from the sample pages on your web site it seems that you have developed an elaborate system. It looks very interesting, and to be quite frank the Japanese books I have been reading do not take such an approach. Where they excel, for me, is in showing some useful principles and in using tactical reading and overall board judgement to apply them. I suspect that your approach might be simply too systemic, but I`m not in a position yet to decide on that.

Okay, that`s enough of this. I just don`t have the time to burn. If you want to get really deep and critical with the Japanese literature, you`re going to have to learn Japanese, because I have neither the time, nor the necessary expertise in the area, nor the duty, to tackle all of your concerns. I`m really sorry if I could not satisfy you, but I have tried my best within reason.

_________________
Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

Thank you! Now, this is a pretty good description of the book, which appears to be much better than the average Japanese book I have seen. I'd guess it might be useful for 7k to 3d players, where about 3k to 3d would know most of the principles but probably share your experience of profiting from the deeper illustration.



I think I would understand that kind of contents from the diagrams. I did not understand such from the Nihon Kiin Fuseki Dictionary because it ends with the opening moves and does not show application of openings during the middle game. Rin Kaiho's Fuseki Dictionary (of which I read an Asian edition) was better in that respect, but still ending rather early. So, if a book shows also later moves, I would have a good chance to understand purposes of openings just from the diagrams.



Also I use tactics and global judgement.



Being more systematic is never bad:) However, the density of theory might be too high for your taste.


EDIT: add middle part of the post.

I`m glad that I`ve been able to answer you a little better. Come to think of it, I suspect that of the Japanese books you`ve seen, many of them would be slim volumes of problems and the like. For instance, 一目の手筋　(Tesuji at a Glance) or 三段合格の死活１５０題　(150 Life and Death Problems for 3 Dans). Often there is no specific author, and they are clearly designed to carry in your pocket - useful for the strap-hanging salaryman to read on the subway, or to sneak in a bit of study while in the lavatory at work. There are many such books on the market, and I`ve bought quite a few along the way, but they do tend to be pretty light on theory, and heavy on problems with very brief explanations. They are also cheap - less than 1000 yen.

The MyCom books are bigger (A5 size I think), and they contain a lot more text, and usually a famous name on the cover. They are printed on thick paper, and have nice matte slip covers with pretty pictures. To what extent they are really written by the alleged author, one can only guess, but you`re getting a lot more content than simply problems plus "white plays here and black plays there". This is only natural, as they are more expensive than the pocket books.

Beyond this, you can also find beautifully bound and presented books with collected game commentaries and special boxes to keep them in, but they are much more expensive.

As with most other things, you get what you pay for!

_________________
Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

Quite likely you could make a good guess at what the author is trying to convey. Besides which, it`s not so hard to learn a few kanji (正解 solution, 失敗 failure, 実践の例 actual game example etc.) and there are often little icons (for instance, a flashing beacon like on a cop car, in the Ishida book) to help get the point across.

All that said, there is a lot of content in the text, and it would make me sad if you spent a lot of money on buying books that you could not fully enjoy or benefit from.

To be honest, I think it would be excessive to learn Japanese or Korean or Chinese just to study go books. Speaking of myself, I like reading for the pleasure of reading, and because it comes in kind of useful (!), and because it`s an extra skill to add to my CV, should the need arise. Since I`d like to be a high dan player, it seems very efficient to use Japanese books for study because it kills two birds with one stone (一石二鳥).

A little confession: I learned a lot of Japanese reading from street signs! If you`re paying attention, the streets are a classroom, because you`ve got the kanji plus common readings printed all over the place.

_________________
Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

I have seen all of that, but of type II hardly any books of the Ishida's quality of contents.



If only it would be that simple!

I mentioned some time ago that I started looking at chess literature with a view to learning lessons for go. There is a very large corpus of works there that deal (most often in English) with how to think during a game, how to study, how to prepare etc, and much of this is based on current research into cognition. Quite a lot of the latter has also been rendered into popular books outside of chess, and so all in all there is an awful lot of reading matter available now.

I have only read a small fraction, of course, but everything I have read points in one direction: the methods Tami describes are the fruitful ones, Robert's is sterile (interesting though I have founds his ideas in the past). If others wish to test my conclusions briefly, I would strongly recommend Chess for Zebras by Jonathan Rowson (may be the best go book written in English - I skipped the chess examples), and on the non-chess side Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel prizewinner Daniel Kahneman explains what is and should be going on in your brain in a very accessible way. Further, I see that a book I recommended in an earlier thread, Move First, Think Later, has just won an award as chess book of the year.

In a nutshell, to become a strong chess/go player, you have to learn to trust your intuition. A more advanced aspect is that you have to learn to treat every position on its merits using intuition then calculation, and not as a pattern you can look up in your brain, nor must you rely on static evaluations.

All of this seems to accord with how Japanese go literature has been presented for decades. To repeat an example I gave before, Shimamura Toshihiro said (in the 1950s) that the way to judge a joseki was not by a formula measuring territory and influence but by what sort of fighting shapes it gave for the fight in each particuar game.

However, there was, I thought, a good example in what Tami wrote of the sort of thing that causes so much frustration for Robert with Japanese literature.



I feel sure that very few people would find the English objectionable. Indeed it seems clear and useful. But there is a word used three times in the Japanese which does not appear once in the Engish. This is 構え (kamae). I latch on to this simply because, in working on Volume 4 of The Games of Honinbo Shuei this month, I included a short digression on this word, which is almost invariably omitted or mutated in English translations. I have done the same myself. Its basic meaning is 'construction' or 'structure' (though 'posture' is an important nuance), but these are ugly words that are often difficult to work into a smooth sentence. However, it is really a basic concept of its own (I won't explain here but the Shuei game shows a telling example) both in the fuseki and (in slightly different form) elsewhere. In one of his books Robert claimed to have invented the concept of 'construction'. As kamae shows, he didn't (and also he limited it more just to the aspect of local shape, I think), but as it hadn't been mentioned before explicitly in English, he can fairly claim to have made a very useful insight on his own, and had he known about the Japanese word he may have reached his goal sooner.

The above example is a poor one to talk about kamae as a concept (and perhaps pseudo-concept is better anyway), but if I give a much more literal and ugly translation, that may show how much of Japanese go thinking can get lost in translation:

"We refer to structures in which there is an extension in both directions from a corner structure, as in Fig. 1, as a double wing. Since it is an extremely good structure, moves which aim at a double wing, or which prevent a double wing by the opponent, are big."

In a not entirely dissimilar vein, in another recent post Robert mentioned the concept of maximising territories at the boundaries. Though I pooh-poohed that as a new discovery, I think it is fair to assert that it is much more difficult for westerners to learn this concept if they insist on thinking of yose as the 'endgame'. If you think of it (more correctly) as 'boundary plays', you are more likely to be a horse that can be led to water.

I am not sure which of Tami's methods you are referring and would not describe mine as sterile. If, however, you mean Tami's to be "trust intuition, reject explicit knowledge, effort and amount of time is all", then this has not been fruitful for me. The more I reject subconscious decisions and replace them decisions based on explicit knowledge the stronger I became and the better I play. Effort and amount of time are important, but they are not all; they are important for improving reading skill, but explicit knowledge is as important for that because it greatly restricts the amount of necessary reading for a purpose.



This applies maybe for those believing in the existence of intuition. It does not apply to me, who I am convinced not to have any intuition. Reading or endgame by guessing due to experience does not work; maybe it works for 80% of a game's reading / endgame problems, but introducing 20% of blunders would greatly increase my blunder rate.



I suggest: explicit knowledge then, only where it leaves gaps, use reading or calculation.

Pattern? Of course not.

Static? Of course not.



The most unfortunately.



Josekis must by judged by territory, influence AND all relevant other strategic concepts and choices (incl. those related to fighting). Territory is important because... (obvious). Influence is important in its balance with territory and its relevance for positional context and related strategic concepts and choices.



Which game?



Nonsense. The most relevant occurrence is in Joseki 1, p.192. I do not say to have "invented" it.



This is pretty much right.



This is much better. Computer programmers and I have found that endgame occurs in parallel already during opening and middle game, but your introduction of the phrase "boundary plays" to the Western go world has further broadened my related understanding.

Thanks John for this! I had not noticed that I didn`t translate 構え, it was somehow automatic to omit it.

I`d like to know what the professional attitude to translation is: is it better to write natural-sounding English or accurate English? Is it better to render natural English, even at the expense of omitting words or shades of meaning, as I did here?

Actually, I must come clean and admit that I have been toying with the idea of writing my own book, because I believe my idea of basing go study on cognitive psychology is one of the more original thoughts to have passed through my head in recent years. Everybody gives the same advice (tsumego, pro games, play) but not everybody acts on it, and not everybody improves even when they do. As I have remarked elsewhere, often it appears the very desire to improve quickly can be self-defeating: i.e., gorging on data, but not digesting it, looking for tricks and shortcuts and gimmicks. Again, I think there is a big gap between knowing about a skill and being able to perform it consistently and appropriately - as I have also said before, it takes about 5 seconds to grasp what "alternate picking" means on a guitar, but about 15 years (give or take a few!) before you can do it like Yngwie Malmsteen or Steve Morse. Likewise, individual go concepts may not be very much more complicated, but learning how to apply them is a bit of a challenge.

If I can boost my own strength by adopting a "scientific approach", and to a high enough standard, then I might gain the credibility necessary to write a book of my own. I really hope this will happen. However, I am already spread pretty thinly...but having a long-term aim is a start.

_________________
Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

To repeat the contents exactly.

There may be a problem with trying to compare chess and go: chess strength is said to rely a lot on tactics and remembering openings. Now, if cognitive studies reveal something for learning that, it cannot be applied directly for go, where strategy and conceptual thinking are, IIUC, much more relevant.

That's very anecdotal for you Robert! The current World #1 is both not particularly strong in openings, and is well reknowned for pulling draws out of lost games and wins from drawn games based on a very deep strategic understanding of the position

I'm sure there's plenty of strategic and tactical depth in both games for people to become very strong with a brilliance in one area and mere competence in the other.

My question was aimed at John, although I also appreciate your opinion. The trouble with translating Japanese to English is namely this:

ロバートさんのやり方は、直接で文字どうりに日本語から英語に通訳すると、分かりにくいになりますが。

Robaato-san`s way to do concerning, directly literally translate Japanese to English time, very hard to understand becomes, hmmm.

So, I wondered if John might be willing to share his view, as a world-class linguist and translator...

And I`m off to dinner.

_________________
Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

"exactly the same contents" does not require "literally the same presentation of contents".

Still, the question concerned the "professional attitude to translation". Was your comment based on the consensus opinion of professional translators, or were you just expressing a personal preference?

Personal, with the extra experience of a) translating texts with the need for precise contents of mine from English to German or vice versa and b) being a rules expert having suffered from less than exact translations by others.

@Tami: Depending on how interested you are in learning more about translation, you might want to look at The Routledge Course in Japanese Translation, which is what the professional translators at kanji.koohii all recommended. I'm still at the beginning so I can't really tell how useful it is yet, but it seems well written and has lots of examples and exercises. Your question is also addressed.

This is exactly why I started the "What are the Basics" thread. I was hoping we could all discover together some of these previously hidden jewels


basics like these (not that these have been previously unknown, but just to be able to list them out somewhere.)

Tami, I don’t know whether this has been spoken out before, so …

Have you ever thought about translating Go literature into English? From what I’ve read from you I’d definitely be interested, and I’m sure others here would also be. I guess you’re probably far too modest to seriously think about such alone, but perhaps if others told you …

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Eastern culture have different way of looking at problem than Western culture.
We look at a ---> b and try to derive what is in between by looking at the result.
Western culture are more intrested in what is in between than the the result. I mean they assume that what is in between will determine the result.
That approach is scientific and logical but...many things in life are too complicated to understand so Eastern perspective sometimes works better.
Go can be one example of above.

Another example i can give is..Chi. Science can not prove it scientifically so they will not accept that notion.
Another example is ying & yang concept. Although Western culture do have something close but it is not same.
I believe that is why Asian players learn go reletively quicker than Westerner.
I personally believe that Tami has more potental to become a professional strength than Robert because he will never accept that concept that he doesnt know.

I am thinking that different culture is a result of different writing style.

_________________
"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson