The correct way to approach how a beginner should learn Go

I think your list is a very solid outline of key topics that beginners should learn. It clearly shows that you have already put a lot of time into getting an idea of the basics. I don’t notice any major omissions and the usage of terminology and organization of topics seems good.

Opening theory in go can be quite a challenging topic and learning joseki is not really necessary too early on. Some would even advise to delay studying joseki.

There is a free book about 9x9 go strategy: 81 Little Lions: An Introduction to the 9x9 Board for Advanced Beginners, by Immanuel deVillers — Revised Edition (2019)
The beginning of chapter 3 of this book has some very nice advice about how joseki could fit into learning about go.

So basically, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not worrying too much about opening theory at this point.

Life and death is a very tricky topic. Indeed, I think the fundamental challenge in go is figuring what stones should live and which should die, since determining these will also depend on the overall strategic considerations on the board.

A big part of getting stronger at go and understanding more about many phases of the game is to practice more at understanding life and death. A good way to do that is to solve “tsumego”, which are go problems that revolve around life and death. You can find a lot of these on the puzzles section of the website.

As for learning the rules, I think it’s good to have the perspective of seeing that both area scoring and territory scoring produce nearly identical results, but as for learning the minute details, I would recommend against diving too deeply into the hairy details of the Japanese rules at this point, since it’s an endless rabbit hole of complexity. See the New Zealand rules or Tromp Taylor rules for concise and clear descriptions of the rules that are also complete.

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