Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Realistic Goals as adults/late starter

I am an adult starter too. I used to play violin as a child. Started piano lessons when I was 24. Now I am 39. I plan to play at parties or as an accompanist or whereever I could play. I practise 4 days a week for 5 hours.

I've often wondered if how much of the difference in adult language acquisition has to do with the fact that, as far as I know, no one spends a few years talking to an adult learner without expecting a verbal response, the way we do kids...no one talks to adults the way they do babies and toddlers. I'm not talking about baby talk. I'm talking about single words and simplified sentence structure. If an adult spent a couple of *years* in full-immersion language learning, doing nothing else, the way kids do, being talked to the way we talk to toddlers, being corrected the way we correct toddlers, how well would they learn?

The same with music. I think it was the musical fossils webpage or another webpage like it, where a teacher, who was currently visiting a piano pedagogy conference and listening to others' students play, commented that if one of their own adult students was 7 years old instead of 40 (or whatever), their skills and amount of progress would impress the other teachers and they would get a tremendous amount of positive feedback. Since it was an adult, however, no one would be impressed.

I think smaller stages of accomplishment get significantly more praise in children than they do in adults. For things like music and language acquisition, I think that's a big part of the picture.

Many moons ago I used to teach English as a second language in Central America at a place that took exactly this philosophy. We attained amazing results with adults -- even with people of limited literacy.

Therefore, critical periods for higher levels of musical expertise are probably quite fluid, and it is clear that there are multiple pathways to achieving musical expertise.

It is the same like playing Schumann's Traumerei...It is not that difficult to just play, but play beautifully is different matter.

This developmental step is an either-or proposition, but the handicap is not complete and may in fact be minor. This step is probably around age 8, and most of us miss that for both music and foreign (but not native) languages.

After mid teens, acquisition of either skill continuously and slowly deteriorates.

I've seen so many other parents try to keep up with their children at piano lessons, fall behind, and give up as something they just can't do.

I work in languages including occasionally teaching it one-on-one and am learning a new language at a relatively late age - more successfully with less effort than as a young adult.