Now that's interesting because...So far I tried to play a couple of games with 7 "nexuses" in mind. It's too soon to call any result but both of them ended in bad fights for me.
Precisely. I'm afraid it never occurred to me to mention that, in my view, studying concepts via nexuses, or in any other way, should be done away from actual play. It's just too complex. And you need to give your inner brain time to absorb new information (e.g. sleep on it).I also find that by thinking of concepts I'm getting even lazier in reading ahead.
If we look at this in terms of hermaneutics, I'd say that the study of go concepts is a way of studying the context of a game.
In the study of texts, the more contexts you can learn to recognise, the more fluent and accurate your reading becomes. You learn contexts by study both inside and outside the text. So, if your text has the phrase, "she baked a cake with a gefurtel", on the supposition you did not know what a gefurtel was (and so didn't know whether the lady used a gefurtel to make the cake or whether she the made a cake flavoured with a nice gefurtel inside it), how would you go about finding out what the sentence meant? Of course, you would start by looking at the context immediately around the word in the text itself. If that didn't reveal an answer, you might turn to a dictionary. If that didn't enlighten you, you might ask around the internet, and if that got nowhere, you might have to go the extreme of contacting the author's family. Or, if he had died 300 years ago, you might have to give up. But in all that research you did, you probably learnt an awful lot of extra, if apparently useless, information. But that useless information may be useful one day.
Go is like that. You can study so as to learn to recognise as many contexts (positions) as possible, yet it may turn out that you come across a position in an actual game where you have no idea what to play next. And even a pro might find himself in that situation. That's the fun of go. But, more often, and even more often the more you study contexts/positions/concepts (another nexus for you
), you will find that your previous study provides a guide that enables you to read fluently and accurately because the position is now familiar.In a way, the new nexus I am describing here is really not much more than the old pro advice to study by playing over lots of pro games. The aspect of that advice that is often overlooked, and what turns it into a study nexus, is that you have to engage your brain while you are doing it. I find that too hard.
The reason I cast this post in terms of hermaneutics is that I came across such a hermaneutical problem myself a couple of days ago. It was a sentence (in Chinese) in which Xu Xingyou criticised a player of an older generation (I think it was Sheng Dayou) for having the very bad habit of "dividing influence." That leapt out at me as a major concept, essentially unknown to me. But there was no context. As with the gefurtel example, I didn't know whether he meant the fault was dividing one's own influence (=overconcentration or the like) or dividing the opponent's influence (=becoming a target for attack) - or both. So I have to find the text in which he said this, and hope it was in the context of an actual game commentary. The problem there is that Xu wrote three long books of long commentaries, so I am now poring over his Jianshantang Yipu. If that doesn't come up trumps, I'll just go onto another book, and so on. Eventually, I expect to come face to face with a whole new concept. Or not. But the search is exciting.
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