Ithaca What I'm wondering is if you have someone who wants to learn, say, 90% of the major languages in the world, is there a particular language (or a small subset) that the person should start with first? Is there a "first language A" that makes learning most other languages easier, even if they're quite different from A? Is there a language Z that - because of its characteristics - makes it harder for most of its native speakers to learn languages that are quite different from Z?
I donāt think it works that way, instead I think it works in language families. So if you want to learn Romance languages, learning any Romance language will help you when you learn the others. If you want to learn Japanese and then Korean, there are several features in each that help you in learning the other. But learning French is not necessarily going to help you when you decide to learn Japanese. OTOH learning any (second/foreign) language will help you when you go to learn another (third, foreign) language because you learn about the task of language learning and can apply that to the next one.
Separate from that, problem of overlaps between languages (false cognates etc) is a different issue and one that can be resolved over time.
Some of the characterizations of classical piano training (or classical piano music) seem to imply that it's more or less an ideal "first piano language A", if someone eventually wants to be able to play many other styles of music. I don't know how well that holds water, so I'm trying to see if I can set up a loose analogy with spoken languages.
I just donāt think this is true. IOW, I donāt believe that classical piano training is an ideal first piano language. I think what counts as ideal depends on what your goals are. If you want to play syncopated jazz rhythms, not only does classical training not help, but it could get in the way. But if you want to learn to play blues piano, or rock, then learning jazz could help, and vice versa.
OTOH, if you want to play contemporary music like Einaudi, then classical piano training is going to be highly relevant. Or if you want to play impressionistic piano, then there is a lot of contemporary piano music that could be a good entry point (esp. because of lots of that contemporary music is a little easier than, say, Debussy or Ravel).
I think one of the things that influences my thinking about this question, which hasnāt come up here yet, is what Iāve read about how cognitive learning happensā¦ so for example, remember all the ābrain trainingā apps that got attention for the idea that you could get some protective from age-related dementia (for example) by doing brain training? Well the last I read, the research about the benefits of these activities found pretty mixed results. Mixed in that, thereās nothing wrong with brain training per se, but with a lot of them, the conclusion was that brain training helps you get better at the activity you do during the training but it doesnāt generalize much beyond that. IOW if you do a bunch of crossword puzzles, youāre going to get better at doing crossword puzzles, but not necessarily at other cognitive tasks. So if you want to improve your memory (say, because youāre getting old and forgetful) then you should do memory improvement activities rather than play crossword puzzles or other brain games. Or if you want to be able to solve a rubikās cube in under a minute, you should practice solving a Rubikās cube.
So the parallel is, if you want to be able to speak German, study German. If you want to be able to speak multiple languages, study multiple languages.
And if you want to play jazz, study jazz. (And if we want to understand the benefit of Bach for jazz players, weāre going to have to ask a jazz player. š
Does this mean I think classical training isnāt beneficial? No, not at all. I just donāt think itās a given that someone should start with classical training if thatās not the kind of music they want to be able to ultimately play.