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Buondì.
I’ll keep this super-short today, as work stuff got rather piled up while we were at the beach last week. Plus, I have teachers and bills to pay, and an online Swedish conversation at noon. Hurry, hurry!
Also, while I prefer to start work at eight a.m., it’s now after nine, this because of driving Bug to his petting zoo on the other side of town. That takes an hour, there and back. Then I do it again to pick him up in the evening. Two hours out of my day, most days. Rush, rush!
While driving, I reflected on all the car makes and models that were unfamiliar to me. These days it seems like every vehicle looks the same, all in boring grey, white or silver tones, all made in China, or Korea, or some place far from here.
Cars were a lot more distinctive in my youth. Remember the original Mini, for instance? Or the Ford Capri? I tried to persuade my dad to buy one of those, but we ended up instead with the extremely weird-looking Renault 12. It was canary yellow, too. How my teenage friends laughed when I pulled up in it!
Ah, there’s something I recognise! In front of us, the distinctive shape of a Scandanavian-manufactured station wagon, no longer new, as evidenced by the idiosyncratic design and a missing V on its rear.
“Guardate,” I joked to my passengers, “un’O L V O!”
But neither Stefi nor Bug was looking, or had any interest in my witterings.
“Una famosa macchina SEDESE,” I tried again.
Silence.
“Senza la V…”
I gave up.
Così, that’s half of my allotted time used up.
I’ve been playing chess on and off for more than fifty years. My dad taught me the rules when I was seven or eight, but not how to win. Once he’d beaten me a few times, he lost interest, or I did.
I played at school too, and mostly lost. One of my so-called friends, name of Julian, used to surprise me all the time with the sort of tactical moves (forks, pins, etc.) that they teach beginners but that I was blissfully unaware of.
Julian’s dad was a researcher at the university, and used the forerunner of the internet (this was in the early ’80s) to get his child instructions on completing the Rubik Cube, which Julian memorised, learned to use, and refused to share with anyone unless they paid him. Guess it must have been his father that showed him the chess moves with which he was constantly able to surprise me.
Over the next forty years or more I continued to be awful at chess, always taken aback by my opponents’ basic tactics, never having any real idea of what move to play next, and very, very prone to what the chess community call ‘blunders’, that’s to say dumb errors which could be avoided with a little thought.
It was always very frustrating, but I could live with it, at least as long as my kids were still kids, so occasionally beatable.
Now, though, with the youngest of the pack going off to graduate school (since the pandemic he’s improved his own chess skills to a point at which he has no further interest in playing a duffer like me), I could no longer live with the shame of being terrible at chess!
Doesn’t this remind you a bit of many older-adult language learners? They failed to learn a foreign language at school, and have made no significant progress in the decades since. Doubtless I’d have been the same, if I hadn’t ended up living and working “all’estero”.
The parallels continue. Tom mentioned Lichess.org so I took a look at their resources, downloaded the free app, and proceeded to get even more frustrated!
I tried the ‘puzzles’, for which you gain or lose points depending on whether you solve them (sounds a bit like Duolingo…), but my ‘puzzle rating’ sank rapidly.
After a while I noticed a small-font note on the ‘puzzle home page’. I put on my glasses to read it, and learnt there were over 150 puzzles I’d failed at and should therefore ‘play again’.
40 years of lost games, 150+ failed puzzles.
Light dawned!
There was something about my approach that meant I still wasn’t learning, as I’d hoped to. As I’d always hoped to.
I decided to ‘play again’ all the 150 failed puzzles, until I figured out what that something was.
Some of them I had to do two, three or even four times. Even after having failed, seen the answer and worked through the moves, the solution was still gone from my head when it came to try yet again.
There were a few that I never understood, but over the course of a fortnight or so, I got through the whole lot. The ‘play again’ link disappeared. Since that day, a week or two ago, I’ve done the ‘puzzle of the day’ each day, without messing it up once. My ‘puzzle rating’ is back up!
So what finally went right?
My approach was basically ‘do the most obvious move and see what happens’, whereas what I eventually settled on was ‘keep staring at the smartphone but TOUCH NOTHING UNTIL YOU’RE 100% SURE!’
It took a while (150+ attempts) but the revised approach is becoming the new normal, and mostly works.
Joy!
Next I decided to tackle the ‘no idea what to do next, especially at the start’ problem.
The first part of a chess game is called the ‘opening’, which I was aware of, despite not actually knowing any. Hence time wasted scatching my head and a series of poor moves which invariably left my pieces and pawns open to capture.
Lichess.org has a ‘learn’ section, so I searched for ‘openings’ and found hundreds of lessons. One particular opening, the London System, was described as being easy to learn, a sort of Chess ‘paint-by-numbers’, no need even to think about what black is up to. Just play these simple moves. It sounded ideal!
Done with openings (yes, I’m aware that this is only a beginning), I decided to try practising actual games with a computer opponent, to see if having a clear-ish idea of the first few moves helped any.
I recall buying a couple of early-generation chess computers in around 1988 or 1989, neither of which I could ever beat. FRUSTRATION!
And when I first got the Lichess app I tried a couple of games but ‘blundered’ too frequently and lost rapidly each time. Ditto.
But now I had a plan, two plans in fact: ‘just play the opening moves you’ve memorised’, then ‘keep staring at the smartphone but TOUCH NOTHING UNTIL YOU’RE 100% SURE!’
Still though, I lost.
The problem wasn’t the opening, it was still the compulsion to make the next obvious move, without checking for ‘blunders’ first.
Over and over again I ‘blundered’. Couldn’t help myself!
Tom suggested, over lunch, that I analyse my games to see where I was going wrong. But I already knew where I was going wrong: I just wasn’t thinking before acting, or – often – at all.
Teacher, teach yourself!
So I did.
If the problem is that I’m moving before I’ve thought enough, then a solution should be to impose a minimal time limit before allowing myself to move. And spend it thinking, obviously.
I hypothesised this to Tom, who was sceptical, telling me that the usual approach was to move as rapidly as possible (most chess games have a time limit, so moving fast avoids losing due to time running out). Rather than playing more slowly, as I seemed to be suggesting.
But with the computer, no time limit! So I decided to try.
Managing the timer in the ‘Clock’ app on my Android smartphone – to start and stop the timer after each move – was fiddly.
After some trial and error, I settled on a minimum of 45 seconds per move. Timer on, study the board, look at the computer’s move, look at options for my own move, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP! If I’m ready, I move my piece. If not, I keep thinking while the phone BEEPS incessantly, then move.
The timer forced me to think, and mostly I remembered to set it, except on a few occasions when I got carried away by the exciting board action and moved impulsively, with predictable results.
Monday I beat Stockfish (the algorithm’s name) level 3 several times, not losing at all.
Yesterday I battled Stockfish level 4, but after half a bottle of wine and with Bug making a row, I wasn’t at my best, so lost.
But JOY: zero puzzles to play again. Approach problem diagnosed, and on the way to a fix.
All is well in the world!
I am, I feel confident in declaring – and after just a few weeks of effort – better at chess than I’ve been my whole life.
It’s very pleasing.
And here, kiddies, are the language-learning takeaways from my ramble:
- Anyone can improve
- If you’ve failed in the past, could be the approach was wrong
- Figure out what the problem was
- Figure out what you could do differently that might help
- Do it
- Evaluate the results
- Keep doing whatever works, while adding attempts to resolve other problems
Once you figure out the approach, and learn to recognise difficulties to resolve or avoid, teaching yourself isn’t so hard.
Where to start depends on you – what you’re good/bad at, what resources you have available.
Try a few things and see what WORKS. Be objective.
Don’t obsess about grammar. Just as I could make progress with just a superficial knowledge of one ‘opening’, rather than trying to study them all, so too can you speak/understand Italian better with just one or two tenses.
Your grammar doesn’t even have to be correct. Just good enough to get basic meanings across.
In fact, the less time you spend studying openings/grammar, and the more time playing/speaking and listening, the better.
Now I’m really late. Gotta go!
Alla prossima settimana.
P.S.
And here’s the inevitable reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com.
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