“Children learn faster.” Every adult beginner has heard this and most believe it. Having taught both for years, I think it is half true in a way that hides something more useful.
Let me separate the parts.
Where children have the advantage
They acquire physical habits with less resistance. A child shown a hand position adopts it. An adult shown the same hand position analyzes it, compares it with what they were doing, and then adopts a compromise. The analysis is useful for almost everything else and is a genuine obstacle here.
They are not embarrassed. A seven-year-old will play something badly in front of you with no distress at all. This is worth more than it sounds: it means they get many more low-stakes repetitions in a teacher's hearing, which means faults are caught early. Adults hide the bad attempts, and the bad attempts are the informative ones.
They have no deadline. Nobody has told a child they should be able to play something by Christmas. Adults set themselves schedules and then interpret the schedule as a verdict.
Where adults have the advantage — and it is a longer list
You can be told why. This is the big one. I can explain to an adult that the hammer is thrown at the string and then flies free, so that only the speed of the key changes the sound, so that pressing harder is physically incapable of producing a bigger tone. An adult hears that once and reorganizes their arm the same afternoon. With a child I demonstrate the same idea for a year and hope.
Your ear is decades ahead. You have heard thousands of hours of music. You know when a phrase is finished, when something is out of tune, when a tempo is wrong. That is musicianship, it is the hardest thing to teach, and you already have it. Children build it slowly while their fingers race ahead — which is exactly why so many technically fluent children play unmusically.
You can diagnose your own practice. An adult can notice that bar eleven fails four times out of five, isolate it, work out that it is the hand shift and not the notes, and design a fix. A child cannot do this at all and does not learn to for years. It is the single most valuable skill in learning an instrument and adults arrive with it.
You chose this. Nobody drove you here. Motivation that comes from inside survives the difficult months that motivation from a parent does not.
You can concentrate for longer. Twenty focused adult minutes will beat forty supervised child minutes, most days.
What this means for how you should practice
Play to the advantages instead of imitating a children's method.
Ask for the mechanism, always. Never accept “just do it like this” if you can get “do it like this because”. Your comprehension is your fastest route and a method that does not use it is wasting you.
Use your ear first. Find tunes by ear before you read them. Hum a line before you play it. The Russian school begins here for children for a reason, and for an adult it is not a beginner's exercise — it is playing to your strongest card.
Be deliberate about the physical habits, because that is your weak side. Slower, fewer things at once, more repetitions of the movement alone without the music. The part that is genuinely harder for you is the part to give the structured time to.
Make the bad attempts in front of someone. Record them. Send them. This is the child's advantage you can most easily take back, and it costs only a little discomfort.
Do not set a date. Set a next thing instead.
The comparison that actually matters
An adult beginner is not competing with children. They are competing with the version of themselves that does not start.
And on the only question that finally matters — can you end up playing music that is worth listening to, including to yourself — I have never once seen age be the deciding factor. Practice design decides it, and practice design is a thing adults are good at.
The free course is written on these assumptions: it explains rather than instructs, it begins with the ear, and it takes the physical side slowly. And if you would like to know what an experienced listener actually hears in your playing, send a recording — it is free while the pilot runs.