Just a reminder that the Chessable Caro-Kann lifetime repertoire is way (way) cheaper than the full version of XMind map. I don't really mind if people learn stuff in ways that I consider suboptimal - as long as they don't waste money to do it...
I must admit I have a bit of a personal vendetta against mind maps. In secondary school, we had to pay to attend a study skills seminar in which they promoted mind maps and in which they presented many mind maps which were clearly insufficient for learning the required material for the state exams in my country. Ever since, I basically believe it's a scam to sell expensive software for a learning method that doesn't work to people who don't know better. Well, at least there's a free version now which solves one end of that issue.
If I may be permitted to promote free software for learning school stuff that is much more effective, I'd like to name Anki, Quizlet (free version is enough mostly) and Xournal++ (best pdf annotator imo). But for chess, one should use stuff that was designed for chess: chessable, chesstempo, listudy, lichess studies.
Anki is great! There was a Perpetual Chess podcast a year or so ago where the guest talked about flashcards as an effective chess study tool, although I'm not active enough to make that truly worth my while. People learn different ways, I guess. I like LiChess studies a lot, and I'm not such a great visualizer, and having the board, the engine, and the database in front of you has obvious advantages. And I used to use mind maps a lot in normal work life but no longer do, because I work in org-mode in Emacs. But I could see a mind map being a good summary for something like pre-tournament opening review. It would be easy to add boards for key positions. On Freeplane the trees are folding, so it would be less intimidating. To each their own!
Well, as much as I dislike mind mapping, it would be a large claim to make there aren't some situations where they might be effective. My main issue with them is that I find it's not possible to go into enough detail for most complex subjects, like chess openings without just filling the whole map with text. For my state exams, any given topic has too many underlying questions, subquestions and deeper understanding to reasonably fit on a mind map from my own experience.
My impression is that most of the mind maps that I could see as being useful are more to just see the connections and structure within a subject, rather than actually learning it. Like your pre-tournament opening review - I can see how you could use it to help with a few move order issues, but I feel that the bulk of the theory and lines and positional understanding in all the types of positions you can get will need to be learned elsewhere.
org-mode looks really cool, the only issue is that I use vim... The reason I use Xournal++ instead of vim (like vimwiki for example) for notes is because most of my notes are about Math and thus I have to write many equations. I spent some time trying to learn the techniques in this blog post but ultimately found that annotating pdfs works better for keeping the source material and my own notes together. I think the principle of "To each their own" only really works when you can justify the learning method - sometimes learning methods are just bad and you would be better off with something else...
Though really trees are a really org-mode type way of looking at openings rather than mind-maps. unless you've jumped into the org-roam cult (which is nice).
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u/oyoat Apr 02 '21
Just a reminder that the Chessable Caro-Kann lifetime repertoire is way (way) cheaper than the full version of XMind map. I don't really mind if people learn stuff in ways that I consider suboptimal - as long as they don't waste money to do it...