If you really, genuinely, urgently need a deadly weapon for self-defense, you should either be a law enforcement professional, or looking for a dwelling in a different neighborhood. This is just my way of emphasizing that carrying a weapon is a lot less important than being tactically aware of your circumstances and staying away from dangerous situations, the art of fighting without fighting (Bruce Lee - Enter the Dragon). Hence, training is a lot less important than using your head to stay out of trouble too.
What style of training is best really depends on what is available. If it is reality-based training, it will be good training. However, there isn't much knife training out there that isn't Filipino-based.
You can defend yourself with a knife (be aware of the laws regarding use of deadly force), with very little training, just hold the knife out there and cut anything that comes your way. Training is more important when your attacker has a knife. To my mind training is all about learning how to avoid getting cut. How well you do that depends on how well you train. You can do a lot of sparring, but if your technique is bad, you will still get cut and possibly die.
A typical Filipino training class would include the basics of blocking, redirecting, avoiding, and lastly, cutting. You would practice basic blocks, paries, and counter attacks over and over so that they become automatic responses. From there you might go one to two-man drills designed to teach a certain skill, followed by counter for counter sparring, where you make a controlled attack against your partner, he blocks or paries your attack and counters with his own attack which you block or pary, and so on. Ultimately, you should do some reality-based, full speed sparring. A good guro (teacher) will spice things up with weird situational drills, like turning off all the lights, many against one, one-armed defense against multiple attackers, surprise attack, and so on.
My approach to knife defense has always stemmed from two aspects of my personality, the will to defend myself from violent attack, as opposed to submitting to it, and a love for good knives. I always have a knife of some sort on my person, preferably a good sturdy one, so I might as well figure out how to use it as a tool for self-defense as well as for utility. I enjoy the challenge, fellowship, and discipline of martial study, so it makes sense that I would belong to a Filipino martial arts school, the Inayan System of Eskrima. That is how I approached self-defense, I looked until I found a good teacher, and then dedicated a fair size piece of my life-style to training.
Filipinos stylists don't really favor one type of knife over another as far as I have noticed. It is a generic tool. My guros regularly say that our techniques are our weapons, not the blades and sticks we train with. Having said that, the ubiquitous blade in the Philippines is the bolo, or a small to medium sized machete-like blade meant for clearing brush around the rice fields and fruit trees, and that is the primary weapon of the FMA in my view, though there are many styles that work with smaller blades that could be any small hunting or food processing knife.
I think it would be really cool to carry a bolo around everywhere like the farmers in the Philippines do, but it isn't practical in an urban environment. I like to carry a 4" fixed blade. It makes an ideal utility cutting tool, and a powerful self-defense tool as well. I have found that I can carry a knife of that size openly without attracting attention. In situations where a such a knife is not appropriate, like work, I carry a folding knife, concealed, usually in the 4-6" inch size, along with a smaller pocket knife.
Oh, and if you cannot really learn technique from videos, you sure cannot learn it from a forum post. I remember, any 90 pound woman can kill a 300 pound man with a knife, what requires skill is not getting cut, not getting killed when your attacker has a knife.
[This message has been edited by Steve Harvey (edited 07-12-2000).]
