Am I glad I read it? Yes.
Will I read it again? I will refer to it again, especially as I try to learn the tennokata omote.
Reflections? Much of the material was repeated verbatim from Funakoshi's "My Way of Life" autobiography, so I was able to skim a lot. Some descriptions of techniques are unclear, some are just plain incorrect. The pictures also sometimes conflict with the written instruction.
Recommended? Overall, yes.
Doesn't he have another book as well? Karate Do Kyohan? What's the difference between them?
ReplyDeleteYes, he also wrote Karate-Do Kyohan, which I also have, but I haven't started on that yet. Nyumon is subtitled "The Master Introductory Text" while Kyohan is subtitled simply "The Master Text".
ReplyDeleteUpon flipping through Kyohan, it seems to me that it has a more objective (as opposed to anecdotal) history of Karate-Do. Also, the lion's share of Kyohan is devoted to step-by-step descriptions of kata (173 out of 252 pages, or almost 69%). Kyohan also seems (at a glance) to contain more conceptual discussions than Nyumon.