So I'm a big fan of the board game Go. I know I've seen a few other members mention it in the past and I've just spotted a user with a Go avatar (zodiac! ). Here's a good absolute beginner's tutorial to the game in English if anyone wanted to have a look.

Anyway, there's plenty of cool, free Go content on the internet (especially Youtube!) in English but a surprising lack of stuff in Japanese (especially audiovisual content...lack of Japanese youtubers!). So, I thought I would start a thread where people could share cool Japanese Go stuff!

I'll start with what I know:

◆Cool youtube channels:
・ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYeX5wv...d1A/videos
This channel updates every week with games from the NHK Go tournament and sometimes other tournaments (with the Japanese commentary)

・ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChBH0Ks...cQQ/videos
This channel has a bunch of historical games from the NHK Go tournament from the 90s (with the Japanese commentary)

・ https://www.youtube.com/user/denen2005ys/videos
some tutorial videos (joseki, tesuji, some stuff for complete beginners) by 恩田烈彦八段

・ https://www.youtube.com/user/richardma531/videos
Hikaru no Go anime with subs in Chinese (easier to ignore than English at least lol)

◆Other cool youtube videos with Japanese commentary:
・

Crazy strong elementary school kids (少年少女囲碁大会決勝)

・

依田紀基九段 vs top computer programs with 4 stone handicap (highly recommended, the commentary is hilarious.)

・

Hikaru no Go anime special episode (Hokuto Cup) (no subs)

◆Websites:
・ http://homepage2.nifty.com/igomine/index.htm
「囲碁のテキストと問題　囲碁入門から２，３段ぐらいの方までが参考になるように作っています」

・ http://mrkigo.sakura.ne.jp/
more learning material I used to use: joseki, tesuji, semeai...

・ http://blog.goo.ne.jp/s-takao-san
高尾紳路九段's blog, he sometimes goes over his games with diagrams too

・ http://ameblo.jp/denen2005ys/
恩田烈彦八段's blog where he posts problems and tutorials

・ http://mainichi.jp/feature/igo/
囲碁 section of 毎日新聞 with Go news, interviews, some game commentary...

◆Books&Manga:
・ Hikaru no Go (ヒカルの碁) obviously. The series that made Go popular among young people again and got lots of westerners (me!) into the game.

・ http://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/483224521X
『みことの一手!』 I haven't read this manga but I want to...

・ http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E6%98%9F%E7%A9%...4592196813
『星空のカラス』 Same for this manga series. This one apparently is shojo manga.

・ http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E5%B0%8F%E5%AD%...4652048203
『小学生でもわかる囲碁入門〈6〉定石をマスターしよう!―梅沢由香里が教えます』 Sadly the only book for Go I've ever owned in Japanese. It's a good book for beginners and is written in easy Japanese for kids.

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では、皆さんも自分が面白いと思った囲碁コンテンツをどんどん投稿してってください！囲碁に関するものなら何でもＯＫっす！ネットに限らず普通に本とかでもいいっす！よろしくお願いしますm(__)m

ps. even if your Japanese isn't that great/you don't know any Japanese go stuff, just post if you like Go lol. I'm not expecting that many replies for a thread with such a narrow scope but I thought a few members would be interested and I wanted to share the content I know about in case people find it helpful. Especially the first 2 youtube channels I mentioned have hours and hours of material if you like Go and are doing Japanese immersion

Ive been interested in learning Go, so I'm going through the absolute beginner link right now. Thanks for that. I've also been interested in learning the basics of hanafuda and mahjong but haven't learned yet.

yogert909 Wrote:Ive been interested in learning Go, so I'm going through the absolute beginner link right now. Thanks for that. I've also been interested in learning the basics of hanafuda and mahjong but haven't learned yet.

Hey~~ yeah that interactive tutorial is really good for learning the rules and basics, and then Nick Sibicky's videos are good for beginners once you know the basics and want to get into the strategy

And never heard of hanafuda so gonna have a look at that now thanks o.o

Wow what an awesome post, thank you Ash_S!

Ash_S Wrote:Hikaru no Go (ヒカルの碁) obviously. The series that made Go popular among young people again and got lots of westerners (me!) into the game.

Me too and about 90% of the players on KGS at around the same time :lol:

I've watched several NHK games on the Eros Brown channel but the length of them rather tends to evaporate my precious free time.

That's a great collection of links to start off the thread. I'm about to sample one of the 九段 vs computer vids but I see it's nearly 2 hours ... ho hum there goes my evening

Waaa just the kind of reply I wanted!
And I hope you like that computer go video. Kobayashi Satoru's commentary is always good (he does a few of the NHK videos as well) but I love his humour in this video.

anotherjohn Wrote:Me too and about 90% of the players on KGS at around the same time :lol:

I know right :lol: Hit me up on KGS, manachann (3k), if you fancy a game

I've watched Hikaru no Go a year ago and tried it out myself. I just had to, it was like DBZ with all the crazy ninja moves! However, I never studied it properly, I just tend to play it on my phone whenever I'm bored and have nothing better to do. 9x9 vs AI, but I've apparently done close to 1200 games by now.

... with a 17 % win/loss on the highest difficulty level. Maybe I do need to check out some of the videos. -.-

Helltrixz Wrote:I've watched Hikaru no Go a year ago and tried it out myself. I just had to, it was like DBZ with all the crazy ninja moves! However, I never studied it properly, I just tend to play it on my phone whenever I'm bored and have nothing better to do. 9x9 vs AI, but I've apparently done close to 1200 games by now.

... with a 17 % win/loss on the highest difficulty level. Maybe I do need to check out some of the videos. -.-

What app are you using? The thing that has kept me from playing is a lack of anyone to play with, and I only have a physical board.
Of course, if computer Go is anything like computer chess, then it's a completely different game than against humans... Still better than not playing at all, though.

Ash_S Wrote:Hit me up on KGS, manachann (3k), if you fancy a game

I may just do that. Unfortunately playing go is something that fell by the wayside when I started learning Japanese (getting my excuses in early )

sholum Wrote:What app are you using? The thing that has kept me from playing is a lack of anyone to play with, and I only have a physical board.
Of course, if computer Go is anything like computer chess, then it's a completely different game than against humans... Still better than not playing at all, though.

Go Free. It was the first app I found and it works fine. It rarely makes bad moves on such a small board and it's pushing me around as if it already calculated everything.

I've never played it with a person yet either. It's not a popular or even known game around here (Austria & Slovenia)

anotherjohn Wrote:

Ash_S Wrote:Hit me up on KGS, manachann (3k), if you fancy a game

I may just do that. Unfortunately playing go is something that fell by the wayside when I started learning Japanese (getting my excuses in early )

Awesome And yeah, that's kinda why I'm trying to combine Japanese and Go where I can x)

And for the people without people nearby to play with in real life, you could check out KGS or other online go servers, plenty of people online to play with

I'm lucky enough that my little English town has it's own Go tournament every year, but besides that I just play online.

nevermind.

So... How do I get Java applets to work in Firefox now? I forced it to ignore the default plugin blacklist (because everyone hates Java, but Flash is fine...) and edited the security settings for Java and in Firefox, but I still can't get anything to work. It doesn't even ask me if I want to run Java, it just says it's disabled (which it's not).

Java works just fine outside the browser though.

EDIT: Making sure that the relevance is understood. KGS has interactive tutorials, and I'd like to use them, but they're built with Java.

EDIT: Never mind; I figured something out. That something was junking the regular version of Firefox in favor of the dev version, so that it'd even let Java attempt to run them. Then I had to add several exceptions into Java...
That was several hours of tinkering that shouldn't have been needed; this is why I hate the trend of software that forcefully holds your hand and doesn't give you the option to fend for yourself (Mozilla flat out removed the ability to allow extensions without their certificates from the release version of Firefox (even the ability to change those settings in about:config has been removed); and Google removed the ability to use certain tool packs that are required to use Java in the web browser).
Adding drastic security measures to your software doesn't mean you can't let people disable it or make exceptions.