hey there! listen, i have quite a problem. My bf's birthday is about to come, and as a present i was thinking about the Kyu letter in japaneze printed on a shirt. I know that he will love it, and i don;t know how to get the image so i can get it to print it. I would apreciate a lot some little help. Thx Codrina
Copy the character for kyuu from the box on the main page, put it onto a word processor page, and print it out. Take it to a copy shop that will print it onto a tee shirt. They can enlarge it to the appropriate size.
Here's another way:
Go to the web page : http://www.kanjisite.com/html/start/rhsinfo/r_kyuugrade.html and print the web page. The character for kyuu is in the upper left corner of the page. A copy shop that prints tee shirts will be able to enlarge the character and print it on a shirt.
Neat page. I thought it was funny, though, that a homonym for kyu was "to suck."
What do beginners start out at? I am told 25 or 30 kyu, and Peter Shotwell, in his book Go! : More Than a Game, says 35 kyu.
Depends on what you call a beginner and where you are. In the Netherlands, someone is often called a beginner after following a 5-6 week introductory course, with sessions of 1-2 hours per week. So they have then got about 10 hours of go experience, with some time taken teaching the the rules plus basic tactics (ladders, nets), and the rest spent playing (mostly 9x9 and 13x13). They are then generally about 25 kyu, though talented players may already be 20 kyu, while those slower on the uptake may still be lingering at 30 kyu. And childrens tournaments often even have players in the 35-45 kyu range.
The page on Rating Histogram Comparisons also shows that an AGA 35 kyu is roughly around KGS 25 kyu (and therefore also, presumably, EGF 25 kyu, but the EGF doesn't measure under 20 kyu).
So all in all there is not one clear answer to your question. But roughly I would say that in the AGA system a beginner is probably 35 kyu (which really means something like "in the range 40-30 kyu") and in the EGF system a beginner is 25 kyu (again, this is more something like "in the range 30-20 kyu").