# Ten Years of Learning Piano Cost 160,000 Yuan; for Most Families, the Biggest Expense Buys the Least

> Translation note: The family account and quotations below are presented as reported in the [original Chinese article](http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=Mzk2NDI0NTYzOQ==&mid=2247488417&idx=1&sn=5aeb28d2a21627d0ad07a9827446e3e7&chksm=c4773249f300bb5f7169512ddf04f5e3e303f4caca203db6aa0480352892add758356e43383f#rd), rather than as independently verified testimony. The costs are in Chinese yuan, and the product descriptions reflect the article's China-market context at the time of publication. References to “this year” and “last year” retain that original context.

A mother pulled out the records of what she had spent on her child's ten years of piano learning: five items, totaling 164,000 yuan. Before she went through them, she had three assumptions about those expenses. Afterward, all three turned out to be wrong.

## She Thought the Piano Was the Most Expensive Item

She remembered the year they bought the piano most clearly: 32,000 yuan, after two months of family discussions. Whenever the cost of learning piano came up over those ten years, that piano was the first thing she thought of.

After she went through the records, the piano ranked third.

## She Thought Lesson Fees Were the Most Expensive Item

Her child's regular piano lessons had risen from 150 to 300 yuan each. More than 300 lessons over ten years came to 51,000 yuan. She thought this was the largest expense.

It wasn't. The largest expense was supervised practice: twice a week from the second through the eighth year, at 100 to 150 yuan per session, totaling 58,000 yuan over seven years. Even she hadn't expected supervised practice to cost more than regular lessons.

The remaining two items were graded exams, competitions, teaching materials, and tuning, at 13,000 yuan; and one replacement digital piano, at 10,000 yuan.

![An illustration of different piano-learning expenses, not a data chart](https://static.lianmuse.com/image/blog/dfbd01c195f17a8c3e7943bc349d9fca.jpg)

## She Thought the Most Expensive Item Offered the Most Value

What had 58,000 yuan in supervised practice bought? She thought about it for a long time, then said: it had bought someone sitting beside her child two evenings a week for those seven years, telling him which note was wrong.

Two evenings a week. On the other five evenings, her child still practiced alone, with no one to point out mistakes.

Thinking about it more closely, the practice coach had mainly done one thing during those forty-five minutes: speak up when her child played a wrong note. The regular piano teacher taught new material, corrected hand technique, and explained music—things no one else could replace. The practice coach's one task was to act as the parent's ears. For 58,000 yuan, she had bought a pair of ears that she could borrow only two evenings a week.

That is what “the biggest expense buys the least” means: more than 200 yuan for an evening bought just one thing—“someone telling him whether he was playing correctly”—and only two evenings a week. On the other five evenings, there was still no one supervising. What she regretted wasn't those two evenings. It was the other five.

> Translator's note: The original article gives the supervised-practice fee as 100–150 yuan per session earlier, but says “more than 200 yuan for an evening” here. Both figures are retained; the original article does not explain the difference.

## You No Longer Have to Buy This One Thing by the Evening

Before they stopped supervised practice, she had tried to cover those other five evenings herself. She sat beside her child, but couldn't hear when he played a wrong note. All she could ask was, “Was that run-through correct?” When he said yes, she could only take his word for it. What she lacked wasn't time to sit with him. It was that voice saying, “That was wrong.”

![Listening to playback and marking where to focus in the next practice session](https://static.lianmuse.com/image/blog/b773498211d5dce9d3cd6fcfdc5acf53.jpg)

When we started building Wonder Piano, this was the one thing we set out to address: turning “someone telling him whether he was playing correctly” from something available two evenings a week into something available every evening. As described in the original China-market article, a child practices that day's section in Adventure Mode. If he plays a wrong note, the score stops and waits until he plays it correctly before moving on. It also keeps track of each day—which days he practiced, which levels he completed, and how many times he got stuck on each level. Looking back after a year means seeing a full year's record, rather than two stacks of supervised-practice receipts. Regular lessons continue: the app cannot do what the regular piano teacher does, and it is not intended to.

In the mother's account, her child was in his eleventh year of learning piano that year. Supervised practice had stopped the year before, but regular lessons had continued. She had added up that year's expenses: 14,000 yuan for regular lessons, 1,000 yuan for tuning and teaching materials, and nothing in the remaining categories. Looking through the records, she found that he had practiced on 240 days by September. One evening, after practicing, her child told her, “Today, I'll just get this part right first.” She said that sentence gave her more reassurance than paying for two extra lessons.

After going through the expenses, she said, “If I'd known that those 58,000 yuan were buying a pair of ears, I should have asked in the second year whether I could get those ears without renting them by the evening.”

Look through your family's piano-learning expenses. Which cost surprises you most?

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Wonder Piano provides AI-assisted support for piano practice at home. Here, we write about practice methods, and about the difficulties families encounter when putting those methods into everyday life.