Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 194 of the Listening Time Podcast.
I hope you're all doing well and I hope that your English learning is going really well too.
And at the time of recording this, it's actually the beginning of December 2024.
I record these episodes way in advance, so I'm sure for you, when you listen to this episode, it will be a lot later than that.
But right now, it is the beginning of December.
And I'm super excited.
I love the Christmas season, especially now that I have kids, because they get to experience the Christmas season.
So it's awesome.
And now you hear Christmas music playing everywhere.
And speaking of music, I'm going to talk in this episode about learning to play the piano.
Because that's actually what I'm doing.
Believe it or not.
When we say believe it or not, it's like saying, I know this is a surprising fact, but it's true.
And prior to this year, probably, I had like no interest in music.
I had no interest in in learning to play any instrument.
So this is quite a surprise, even to myself, even to me, that I'm trying to learn the piano.
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All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
Okay, let me talk about learning the piano, learning to play the piano.
As I already said, I am not a musical person, naturally speaking.
Of course, you can become more musical.
I'm not saying that this is something fixed like you either have it or you don't, and you can never change that.
I don't believe that at all.
But I think that some people have a more natural interest in music or a more innate desire to play music or sing music.
The word innate just means natural inside of you in this case.
So Some people have an innate desire to make music, create music.
I am not that way.
I do have the innate desire to write music songs, but not the music part of the songs.
I have always loved writing, i've always loved creative writing, whether it be stories poems, songs even.
But, like I said, I can't write the music to the songs.
I just like writing lyrics to songs.
And one of the main reasons why I have decided to try to learn the piano is because recently...
I've been writing hymns.
The word hymn refers to a spiritual song that you would sing in a church.
So I love writing hymns.
I've been doing this over the past year or so.
And my friend who is a piano player.
He's the piano player at our church.
He has been putting them to music.
When you put something to music.
That means that you take the lyrics and then you write the the music to go along with the lyrics.
So it's been a lot of fun for both of us seeing these songs actually become real songs, and that has gotten me interested in learning more about music.
Really I'm more interested in the lyrics and just the words of the song.
That's really what I'm passionate about.
But because I've spent so much time doing this this year, I can't help but feel a little bit interested in the other side of this, the music side of it.
So that has sparked my interest a little bit.
And I find that it's easier to encourage your kids to do something and get them more interested in it or passionate about it when you yourself do this thing right.
If you're a tennis player and you love tennis, it's probably easier for you to kind of give that passion to your kids, more than giving them the passion of swimming, let's say.
So I hope that if I can learn more a little bit of piano.
I can better help my son or my daughter or any future kids play that instrument or another instrument if that's their desire.
So I hope that that can be a benefit as well.
And one other reason, I guess there are three reasons why I want to learn the piano.
The third reason is because it's going to be an interesting experiment for me to just learn something completely new after the age of 30.
So I'm 31 right now.
I don't think any of you knew my age before this episode, but there it is.
I'm 31 at the time of recording this and people talk a lot lot about when a person stops being able to learn something easily, and usually the age that people will talk about a lot is age 30.
I'm sure some of you have heard this.
Some of you have heard that after age 30.
It's not easy to learn new things, especially languages and musical instruments and things like that.
And I'm sure there is some truth to this.
Of course, things can often be easier to learn. when you're younger, for different reasons.
However, I think that we probably exaggerate the difficulty that someone over the age of 30 has when learning new things.
And I don't want people to be deterred from learning English just because they're starting from scratch at the age of 40.
For example.
By the way, when you deter someone from doing something, this means that you make them not want to do it.
Like you persuade them or something you do makes them not go in that direction.
They do something else instead, or they don't do it because of what you're saying, or something like that.
So I don't want people to be deterred from learning English, for example, just because they're over the age of 30 and they've never had an English class before in their life.
So I think this will be an interesting experiment to just try to learn something new after the age of 30 and to see how well I can learn it.
I will say that I'm not going to pour my heart and soul into the piano.
When you pour your heart and soul into something, it means that you put all of your effort and energy and love and passion into that thing.
I'm going to pour my heart and soul into my kids, but I'm not going to do that into the piano right.
I want to learn the piano first. but it's not like my ultimate passion in life.
It's not something that I'm just gonna do for hours every day.
So I'm gonna take it easy.
I'm just gonna do a little bit of practice most days.
So I don't expect to make a huge amount of progress very quickly, but I'm gonna try to be consistent.
And so far, I have.
I think that I've been practicing for maybe a month or so, maybe less than that.
I can't remember.
But something like that.
And I've been pretty consistent so far, and I've actually enjoyed it a lot, really.
So I think that it won't be too hard to practice a little bit most days.
But again, if other things are happening, I'm not going to prioritize the pianos.
So don't expect me to give you a report in six months and say that I'm an expert, okay?
But I think it will be an interesting experiment for me and for whoever else is following my piano journey, to see how well I can learn, especially me being someone who is not musical right.
Because if someone has a huge desire to do something, because they're passionate about it, they're gonna learn better most of the time, unless they have a really bad method or something.
So I don't have that same passion.
So if I can do this, then that means that someone who has a lot of passion, something that they want to learn after the age of 30, can definitely do it okay and hopefully after a while, if I start to get a little better, maybe I can even write a little bit of my own music for my own songs, like The lyrics that I write.
Maybe I can put them to music.
Maybe not.
I'm not viewing that as my goal.
That's not necessarily what I'm trying to do.
But who knows?
Maybe I'll be able to do that in the future.
And I just really want to challenge myself to learn something new.
We can get very comfortable with our lives as adults and not really do new things or learn new things.
I think many people can identify with this.
They're not actively trying to go out and learn new, new skills, learn instruments, learn languages or whatever, just because like, they only do that because they have to.
Right.
But I kind of want to keep learning throughout my whole life.
I want to learn things.
I like learning.
So this will be a good challenge for me.
And It will stimulate my brain and I can learn just like I said, I like learning.
So what exactly am I doing to learn the piano?
Well, I don't have piano classes.
There's no teacher that is accompanying me through this process.
Who knows?
Maybe in the future, if I get really interested in it, It might be worth it to take some classes.
But right now, I'm just following a YouTube tutorial series.
It's really good so far.
I really like the way that the guy did it.
I think that there are, like, almost 30 videos, like...
I forget the exact number, but I think I am on video number nine, maybe.
And I'm going slowly through these videos.
I practice most days, probably five or six days a week, for somewhere between 15 and 40 minutes.
15 would be the bare minimum.
We use that phrase bare minimum to mean the absolute minimum.
It cannot be lower than that.
So 15 minutes is the bare minimum.
And then the maximum is like 40 minutes.
But usually it ends up being like 25 minutes or something, maybe 30 minutes sometimes.
That's probably the amount of time I spend with the piano most days.
And like I said, I'm working slowly through this YouTube tutorial series.
And it's a challenge for me to see if i can just exercise discipline and stay on track and actually go through all the videos and complete this series.
There is a lot of temptation to just deviate from the series and try to look up how to play blah blah song and just try to copy the person.
When we say that you deviate from something, we're saying that you go off of that path in a different direction, right?
So the temptation is there to deviate from this tutorial series.
So I'm trying to be disciplined and actually complete the series slowly.
It'll take me a while, but I want to do this, or at least until I feel like I don't need it anymore.
If I get through 20 videos and I feel like I don't really need to continue with the tutorial, I'll start to go in a different direction.
But I don't want to just deviate from it because I'm feeling antsy and I want to play songs.
By the way, when we say that you feel antsy, that means you feel anxious to do something.
You feel like you can't sit still.
You have to do something right.
So i don't want to just get antsy and stop with the tutorial lessons because i want to just start playing music.
I actually want to learn more about the theory, learn more about the mechanics and try to complete as much of this tutorial as possible.
I really want to have a foundation that will be useful for when I have to help my children, for example, if they want to play the piano.
So I actually want to be able to read music.
I know that this is a little bit frustrating for people when they learn a musical instrument.
It's frustrating for me, too.
I'm not good at this, at remembering exactly which note is which when you are looking at the music on the paper, and it's not a natural thing for me, it's frustrating for me, but I'm trying to get better at it.
I'm trying to get better at identifying notes, Just learning the mechanics as well, what the different things are when you look at music, what the little symbols mean and all of that.
Admittedly, this is not super fun.
It's fun to actually play the keys, play the piano.
But for me, it's not really fun to have to memorize the notes and all of that.
That's not the fun part of it.
But I do like to see the progress I'm making in terms of identifying the notes.
I like to see that I'm making progress.
That's satisfying.
But in the moment when i'm uh quizzing myself, on which note is which?
That's not super entertaining.
And, by the way, when you say that you quiz yourself, we're saying that you are testing yourself, you are seeing if you remember something or you know the right answer.
You quiz yourself.
So We'll see if I can stick to my plan to learn the mechanics and establish a good foundation.
I hope I can do it.
But again, this isn't my grand passion.
So there might come a time when I feel like I need to take a break from this.
I'm not pressuring myself to learn mechanics. and reach a certain level by a certain time.
No, I'm just doing this on the side for fun.
So I could very well stop for a certain amount of time.
So I'm not guaranteeing anything here, but I'm excited to see how much progress I can make after six months a year, etc.
And lastly, what are my specific goals?
I think it's good to have goals because, like I said, even though I'm not like passionate about this, I don't have this pressure that I need to learn by a certain time.
I do. want to learn the piano for specific reasons.
And so it is good to actually create goals, because that motivates me to do it, despite the fact that I'm not super passionate about it.
It's fun for me, but that fun might not always propel me forward and motivate me to always practice, etc.
So I think it's always good to think of some goals when you're learning something new.
So of course, I want to be able to read music.
That's a goal that I already mentioned.
I want to be able to play some easy-ish new pieces that are put in front of me.
That's a very distant goal.
That's something that maybe will be years down the road, but it would be awesome to just see a piece of music written down and then be able to study it for some minutes and then start to play it, just because I can read music and I know those notes and those chords and what everything means.
That would be awesome.
Uh, I think it's really impressive when I see musicians just play a new song because they're reading the music.
That's really cool.
So I don't know how realistic that goal is for me if I'm not realistic, super passionate about the piano, but that is something that entices me.
When something entices you, that means it interests you.
It really interests you.
So that interests me.
It entices me to be able to just play music when I see it.
That would be really cool.
Again, I might be a little ambitious with that goal, but we'll see.
And, like I said, I want to have good enough knowledge to help my kids.
This is the only thing that is kind of related to time.
Like I have a deadline kind of with this, because I want my son to be able to start playing the piano if he wants to.
When he's five.
I've talked to several musicians about this and they've told me that for the piano it's reasonable to start a kid when they're five years old, as long as you're not forcing them to do it.
And my son seems to love music.
So if he wants to play the piano at age five, I want to be able to help him with that.
I'm not going to be like a great teacher probably but I want to have good enough knowledge to help him when that time comes.
So that is the only little bit of pressure I might feel is that if he wants to start at a certain time, I want to have the knowledge by that time.
So that's maybe one of the most specific goals that I have, the only one that has some pressure attached to it.
But There's not a lot of pressure, to be honest.
But yeah, that's a goal.
And, like I said before, I want to learn something new and see if I can be disciplined enough to follow the process that needs to be followed in order to learn it.
I want to become a better learner.
That's another goal.
I think that...
We can just assume that we know how to learn things and follow rules.
But when we learn more things and just expand the amount, the variety of things that we learn, Our process of learning gets better.
We learn how to learn.
That is one of the greatest skills anyone can have, to know how to learn things, right?
I think that that is something we should all strive for, to be good learners.
I hope that this helps me with that.
It helps me become a better overall learner.
And one last goal is that I want to enjoy music more.
Like I said, I'm not a musical person, but I enjoy music.
And I want to be able to enjoy it more deeply because music is awesome.
We all know that.
I want to be able to play my own songs maybe that I write.
I want to just be able to play music with other people like, oh, here's a piano.
There's a guitar.
Let's play some music together.
I always find that really impressive when people just randomly start playing music together.
It's a really beautiful thing in my opinion.
So I want to be able to do that and to just enjoy life more, because I think when you can enjoy music and you can play with other people, it is one of those simple things in life that that really gives you joy.
I think a lot of you know what I'm talking about.
I think I just want to enjoy that more.
Enjoy music.
Enjoy playing with other people.
Enjoy the simple things in life like playing a tune with my friends or whatever.
I want to just enjoy things more overall.
And I think that learning to play music can definitely help me with that.
So those are my goals.
I hope that this was interesting for you to see my mindset about why I'm learning the piano.
Maybe this inspires you to learn something new.
I don't know.
And I hope it was good practice for your listening.
And please check out my advanced podcast episodes.
If you want to improve your listening, reach the next level where you can understand when people speak faster than you.
I'm speaking right now.
This is hard to understand them if you're an English learner, but my U.S.
Conversations podcast will help you practice with that type of situation so that you can improve and actually be able to understand people in group settings.
So the link to sign up is also down below.
All right.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode and I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
