Piwin -> RE: Dangerous slope away from flamnco or ... (May 23 2020 6:04:50)
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I have a steel-string and play it fairly regularly, mostly just as accompaniment for singing folk songs and the like. I guess you just need to be careful that it doesn't bleed into your flamenco playing and mess up your technique. Lately I've been considering picking up another language just for fun. I was a little bit concerned about learning another language while I feel I still have a good ways to go with Spanish (I do alright and I can cover all the conversations I need to get by and live here, but I've been sitting on my laurels these last 2 years and haven't made the kind of progress I could/should have made). I chanced upon some videos of some polyglot conference held a few years back and binged through them. A lot of them speak an absurd amount of languages, in the double digits, with some being remarkably proficient. I did think to myself that none of them were as proficient as someone who focused on a single language. But here we're talking about the 0.0001% at the top. Earlier this year I mentioned author Akira Mizubayashi, who to me is one of the few foreigners I've ever heard who learned French as an adult yet is, to my ears at least, indistinguishable from a native speaker. None of these polyglots were at his level. They were very good in French, very good in fact, but I could tell they weren't native speakers. So perhaps one question is just what level do you want to achieve in flamenco. If you just want to be conversant, or fluent, you may have room for something else. If you want to be in that 0.0001%, you may not have room for something else. Me, I'm all over the place in that regard. I play all the instruments I have at home regularly. These days it's especially the piano and recorder. Though in terms of time spent on these instruments, it's quite clear where my priorities are: flamenco guitar. Several of the speakers at this conference talked about strategies for learning new languages. Most of them either said that you should only learn one at a time, and only start another language once you'd reach a strong degree of proficiency in whatever language you were learning before, or that you should give priority to one over the other (for instance, spending 80% of your time studying one, and only 20% the other). To me that makes sense. If you get an acoustic and just play it every other day, once a week or whatever, and keep up your regular practice of flamenco, I wouldn't see it as a problem. But if you go down some rabbit hole to the point where you're playing the steel-string about as much as flamenco, then yeah, then you're on that dangerous slope. So yeah, I'd say 1. depends on your goals, and 2. depends on how much of your flamenco practice is eaten up by time spent on the steel-string.
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