Teaching chess

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
(to children or adults).

Post ideas here.

its kind of been likened to learning a language. A native speaker will see it differently from a non native. Having learned another language it became apparent to me that there were two types of approaches, one in which you got stuck into the environment, immersed yourself in conversation and learned how to speak through pure imitation with no concern for why certain elements are and the other which highlighted learning grammar, participles, vocabulary, conditions etc from a book.

While the analogy seems on the surface to be good, it fails in certain respects, for chess is apparently learned subliminally, as well as practically and visually. Added to this is that for the adult, the process is apparently somewhat different, likened to a native speaker as opposed to a foreigner although the idea is not completely clear in my mind as to why this should be the case, for if we adopt a childlike approach and not question why certain elements have a bearing, simply trusting that they do, then we should also learn through this approach.

Anyhow, Andrew Soltis has an excellent book on the subject, How to study chess in which he points out that there are essentially three components, study, practice and repetition, lots of repetition. He states that,

1.Learning chess should be fun
2.It has to include hands on learning
3.It should be mainly independent
4.Its often subliminal
5.You have to be well motivated
6.You need to be careful of too much information

🙂