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YES!!! these are the best modern books on karate IMO.

sounds good. hope it all works out!

i'm justing saying that i've never seen kung fu people being offensive. i have seen a few videos where a boxer or karateka attacks a wing chun guy, and the wing chun guy disses them, but seriously, i can count on my fingers the times i've seen kung fu people going on the offensive. kung fu may have offensive philosophies, i just never see that being put into practice. i probably just havn't seen enough.

several ways. there's the length of it. most of my (shotokan) kata take like a minute at the most to perform. yours lasted like a minute and a half. you have a lot of fast hand movements done in a single stance, usually we step into a stance, do one or two hand movements and then move into another stance. also, we tend to step around a lot; your kata is almost done on the spot in comparison. it looked like some kung fu forms i've seen, does american kenpo have any chinese influences? these are the kata i'm used to: http://www.narama.cz/karate/kata.htm

that's not necessarily a bad thing. due to moving around the country and changing dojos and stuff, i havn't really progressed much in jujitsu ranks. i've been doing pretty much the same things for about two years now, and guess what? i absolutely own most people in the dojo at those techniques, including those several ranks above me. keep doing the same things over and over, and get very good at them. then when you go up in rank, you'll be better prepared to learn the new techniques, and you'll be better than most of your peers. the old masters used to practice one or two kata in their entire lifetime. you've been doing this for five months. be patient, you'll get to the new stuff soon enough.

you do it better than the green belts? excellent! think how good you'll be when you're a green a belt. don't worry too much about progressing through the ranks or learning new techniques. get as good as you can at what you have been taught. if you're not learning anything, then you're not putting your mind to it enough. you should learn something everytime you do a technique. this sort of thing happens to everyone. try to partner up with the more serious minded students, and speak to your sensei about it.

that makes a bit more sense then. i just never see kung fu people being offensive.

why do kung fu people never attack? or why does no one ever film a kung fu guy making an attack? every video i see they just stand there and get hit.

wow, that's completely different to the forms i'm used to. very quick.

well put. you should post that in the stances thread in the karate forum.

yeah, you know how the kodokan people challenged (and defeated) loads of other jujutsu schools to show how good judo was? well when they challenged the fusen ryu, the fusen ryu guys just layed down and forced a ground fight and they won.

sweet, danzan is very comprehensive system with lots of influences. i believe its got bits of kung fu and even wrestling in it. good luck!

i would say that if its not done with intent to offend, and it doesn't offend anyone, then its not racism anyway. there is a difference between discrimination and friendly jokes.

i really don't buy the idea that kiba dachi comes from horse riding; if you look at the techniques performed in kiba dachi in the kata; none of them would make sense if the practitioner was on a horse.

a mace or flail. apparently they were pretty awesome for bashing up armored knights. i'd imagine they'd be even harder to control than nunchucks though.

fusen ryu students defeated the kodokan students by laying down...is that what parkerlineage is talking about?

yeah, i also agree with angela. and i am/was KUGB.

who told you that? that's not true.

unless you can find a shotokan school that teaches a combative style that incorporates grappling, its probably not what you're looking for. for self defence you want a system that covers all ranges of combat.

Could you go into more detail on your experiences which led to your conclusion that judo might be more useful than BJJ? BJJ is ground fighting, and aims to get the fight on the ground and finish it there. IMO on the street this is a bad tactic; your priority should be to disable the opponent while still on your feet. i have been in situations where if i had gone to the ground i could have been seriously hurt (i described one in the real self defence stories thread in the general MA forum). from what i have seen of the two arts, judo gives you more skills to disable your opponent while staying on your feet, but it still contains a good deal of ground fighting in case the fight does end up on the floor.

first, things like 'horse stance' and 'cat stance' are modern names. they're not really animal stances. these stances come from kata and you have to look at the applications of the kata movements they are used in to understand them. the horse stance is often used in kata as part of a throw. you kind of land in a horse stance as throw is completed. its also sometimes used while you're grappling with the opponent (as in naihanchi/tekki). the kata movements are ideal movements; in a real fight you won't stand there in a rigid horse stance because things deviate from the ideal in a real fight. the horse stance is conveying a principle which is used in the technique. ever see a kick coming out of a horse stance in kata? no, because you're not supposed to kick things from a horse stance. if you get in a fight, don't stand there in a horse stance. however there are some techniques which when executed correctly will be done at least partly in a horse stance. in shotokan, we don't really do any cat stance stuff, and i don't know what a tiger stance is.

yeah, very cool but not really martial arts.

meh, its a belt. if someone wants to waste their time making it look old, it won't bother me. i guess its a bit like buying faded jeans little more than a fashion statement.

i'm totally with you on this. an instructor's job is to teach his students everything he knows. instructors know a lot more than just a set of techniques, and that should all be taught as well. lots of practice should be combined with teaching. practice is vital of course, but practice is a lot better when there's someone there to tell you how you can improve.

nice, i'm guessing you mean JJJ. is it any particular ryu? what sort of training to they do? sparring?