05/21/2008 04:11:27

That's exactly my experience!

I had a fellow join us after going to a McDojo for a couple of years.  He had learned goju kata up to saifa, but had no idea of detail - only the gross/macro movement was there with no understanding.

He had no concept of bunkai.

Very sad.

05/20/2008 23:35:53

Dan, I think you're last paragraph sums up my thoughts exactly. Around here a lot of the charlatans would be lined up first to be the ones on any controlling board. Though it would be nice to weed out some of these charlatans, I don't think it would work very well. Doctors, lawyers, psychologists etc. all have to be regulated but charlatans get by their regulations for those professions. It frustrates me to no end that I have to explain in great detail that my karate training is not the "karate" the person is thinking about. I've since stopped using karate and just use Goju. Then I watch the perplexed look in their face. At that point many people nod their head because they don't know what I'm talking about, ask for clarification, or they already understand  the nameing of different karate styles. We opened a location and had a few people come in from one of these charlatan schools and their experience between the two showed a vast difference they couldn't believe "all the extra stuff they learned in one class" with us. Its not that we are so great, its that some of these other schools are just bad. So from that I learned to just show by example.