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Your Move/Readers Write: Not So Fast, Mr. Kaufman; Fotland's Freebie; American Ing's New Website

Not So Fast, Mr. Kaufman: “A glaring error in Josh Kaufman's chapter on go in 'The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast!' (Expert On “How to Learn Go in 20 Hours” 6/18 EJ) underscores the danger of 'fast learning' espoused in Mr. Kaufman's book,” writes Daniel Chou 6D. “The go chapter lists Chinese characters for go in both traditional and simplified glyphs. However, there is a typo in the simplified glyphs that translates to 'Restroom Board Game'!? A mistake like this undermines Mr. Kaufman's credibility for his method of learning go quickly,” Chou says. “Kaufman criticizes Malcolm Gladwell's '10,000-hour to mastery' rule-of-thumb and asserts that few people would commit to that level of effort. He claims that anyone could learn the basics of any subject quickly by applying the methods described in his book. But if he could not even get the Chinese characters for go right, why should anyone continue reading to learn the basics of go in 20 hours? Although I am excited that a popular non-fiction book devoted an entire chapter to go, I wish Mr. Kaufman and his editor spent a little more time on due diligence to fact-check the Chinese characters for go.”

Fotland's Freebie: “Many Faces of Go creator Dave Fotland has created Igowin, a great little freebie that plays on a 9x9 board, and, when you get to the 1-2 dan level, is difficult to beat,” reports Peter Freedman. “I think it's strength goes up to 5 dan.” Download Igowin here . 
American Ing's New Website: American Ing reports that they're moving to a new web page. The Ning website will go down July 1st.