[Introduction]

I have a habit of biting off more than I can chew, so I hope learning guzheng and erhu at the same time won’t be one of those kinds of situations. Since I have the opportunity and resources to learn more traditional Chinese instruments it’d be a waste to not go for it. So, I signed myself up for guzheng lessons, and this was my first week of lessons. The same day I signed up I got a trial lesson with my future teacher. It was only for about fifteen minutes so I didn’t learn too much.

The guzheng is played using fake nails, and naturally, the first thing we did in the lessons was to learn how to put them on.

The fake nails to my knowledge come in sets of 8; there are four nails for each hand. Three of the nails go on your index, middle, and ring finger respectively. The last oddly shaped nail goes on your thumb. When I get better at actually taping the nails myself, I’ll probably do a video about how to put them on, but we’ll skip the details for now.

[The Lesson]

When I signed up for the lessons, the school made me purchase a book which was the test material for the national guzheng exam.  My goal was to be able to pass the first or second level exam by the summer, so I was already pretty excited to know that the material they use is in alignment with my goal. When the time came to start class, I told my teacher directly that I wanted to work towards taking the exams and I pulled out the book they gave me. She basically said, I need to learn some basics before we even use that book. I thought that was odd, considering the book literally starts from the basics, but whatever. So she took out some random short songs and had me play through one of them.