7starmantis said:
If learning taiji is your goal, whats the point in learning somethingelse, stay with taiji.
Well, I wanted to learn tai chi, but the teacher I was taking classes with taught kung fu first so I went along with it. I suppose I could have refused or taken classes elsewhere, but I felt that he would teach tai chi well. I wanted to have some exposure to the martial applications of it and didn't think I'd get them with other classes I was aware of at the time. I also didn't think it would hurt to have some other training. We were told that the style we were doing was typically the first one students in ancient China learned because it gives you a strong foundation to work from if you move into other styles later. That seemed to be a good enough reason to me to go along with it and get some practice in the style.
Anyway, being the beginner that I am, I'm not sure I can really answer the question that well. Both sides seem to have good points. Learning an external art will probably give you more practice in punching and kicking techniques and how to do them properly. Having some basics like this could help. But if the body movement is so much different in internal arts, you have the potential for carrying the external movements into the internal movements, resulting in a bad habit that has to be broken when learning the internal art. Someone who comes in without any prior experience won't have that problem.
I don't have much experience, but I suspect the main difficulty for a beginner doing an internal art first is dealing with the internal aspects, chi flow and trying to generate energy without pure, hard, physical force. Some of that will probably be delayed a bit until you get down other basics, like the movement (being rooted and balanced in tai chi as the weight shifts from one foot to the other, for example), but they're still more subtle concepts. You can't exactly show someone how to do these sorts of things, just explain as best you can and hope they can get it, so they're probably harder to grasp. A good teacher can probably do more than I realize, but still. An external art which is mainly hard, direct force is probably a little easier to understand the main concepts of. I don't think this necessarily means that an external practicioner will pick up the internal aspects faster than a total newbie though. So I'm not sure if there's a real advantage to either way, starting an internal style as a total newbie or coming into it after having some experience in external arts. Every art should be able to stand on its own and teach you all you need to know, even if it's in different routes and methods, so like 7starmantis said, if you want to learn tai chi, why not just start with it and stick with it?
