I have a relatively new friend who has been studying piano for ten years, though she’s really good at it, she’s ashamed others took far less time to reach her level.
What would be a good thing to say to raise her spirits.
Something about tortoises and hares I suppose.
Who is she comparing herself to?
Ten years seems a reasonable timeframe to me - I started when I was 9 and did my Performers Certificate when I was 18.
Point out to her that, 10 years ago when she started to learn piano, there were tens of millions of Americans who, like her, couldn’t play the piano. Unlike her, tens of millions of them still can’t.
Ask her why she learned to play the piano. Was it primarily for competitive reasons? Most people learn to play instruments as an expressive / therapeutic outlet (and because it is just lots of fun). Tell her there will always be someone better than her at piano (or anything), and that it’s more about personal benchmarks rather than external competition.
It only took 10 years? Pretty good.
My mother is a piano teacher. I have seen many students come and go and ten years is not an unusual amount of time to go from beginner to reasonably good.
You say “Wow, you are really good at piano!” What does how long it took matter?
What Dorjän said.
It seems a bit odd to me (and I suspect to others here) that she’s ashamed of taking ten years because we don’t know what her frame of reference is.
There are many factors that affect how quickly one achieves a certain level of competence in playing an instrument. Some people are able to practice for many hours a day; many don’t have that much time to devote to it. Those who start as children will often learn faster due to some brain capabilities that fade away in the mid-teens. People may learn faster with one teacher as opposed to with a different teacher. And of course some have a natural talent/inclination that not everyone is blessed with, but there’s no shame in that. We all have different combinations of inherent ability, environment while growing up, and opportunities to learn, so of course not everyone will progress at the same rate.
My thinking is she should be proud of what she’s accomplished and what she can do. Far better to focus on the pleasure of making music than on comparisons of the learning curve. The ten years have passed – to hell with them, have fun with the music!
They say it takes 10,000 hours of any activity to master it. That she can dedicate 1,000 hours a year into a hobby solely for her pleasure speaks well for her.
What percentage of adults can play piano at the intermediate level or better? I have seen YouTube videos of college students playing Mozart who say they’ve progressed to intermediate or better within a couple years of starting to play, but I’m not sure whether that’s typical or unusual.
Fascinating thread topic. And while I agree with the common sense shared so far in this thread, I find myself lingering on the OP. For someone who’s afraid of a monster under the bed, the common sense of flipping aside the ruffle and saying “look - no monster!” isn’t always enough. 
I have felt the way the woman in the OP feels. I’ve played guitar for 35 years, and have wrestled with my “musical self-esteem” off and on throughout. At this point, after 35 flippin’ years, I have accepted that it’s a fact of my musical life.
I have found the Ultimate Musical Truth™ for me: I continue to want to play. I have a need for it, and, when the conditions are right, I get a unique joy from it. The longer I play and the better I get, I find that the conditions are right a bit more often. So, regardless of my view on my playing or abilities, I have good guitar habits in place.
You know what the best thing to do is when you’re down on your playing? Keep playing. Otherwise, you give yourself no chance to play your way to a better place.
So - does your friend have a rich “piano life” - does she play, does it satisfy reasonably often? Does she enjoy the gear/chat/geekery part of her music, instrument, etc? If so, then she’s fine and you should just say “wow, you sound great!” whenever you can. If she doesn’t have good habits, so her self-esteem is threatening her ability to continue, then ask her what she might do differently going forward, given what she has learned about her habits over the past 10 very-respect-worthy years…
Hope this helps.
Whilst some lovers of Mozart will be horrified at me saying this: Mozart isn’t that hard to learn, especially the more famous pieces that you’ll find YouTube videos of. Those pieces tend to be of an even speed, in a simple time signature, with predicable key changes. They are the sort of piece that can be learned by an amateur and then practiced and practiced until they can be played at some speed, which is often considered ‘good playing’.
I love playing Mozart, but sometimes I love playing Mozart because it’s quite straightforward and I just want to noodle around on the keyboard for a bit of fun.
ETA: That’s in response to **GreenElf’s **post above.
I’ll agree with that, but many of Mozart’s famous songs are nevertheless intermediate level. What percentage of adults can play at that level, and is it typical for a young adult college student to attain that level within a couple years of starting piano? There seems to be no hard data, let alone soft data, on percentages of people who’ve learned to play a musical instrument or the time required to do so.
She should be bragging.
I’ve been playing guitar for 40 years. My acoustic guitar capabilities are just now nearing “doesn’t suck too much”.
My electric guitar sound is best described as “thundering herd of shaved cats running through a field of cacti”.
I’m getting better.
Some of us have to work harder than others to develop.
But do they practice every day?
Now i have no idea what really good means in this context, but ten years to become adequate at an instrument seems normal. I’ve played guitar for 9 years and still have no clue.
IMO one should hope for a level of competence with an instrument according to what one want or need to use that competence for.
Example: even though I play keys, I don’t care if I can’t play this or that classical piece, simply because my goal is something completely different, namely making weird sounds for audio-visual art and noise music.
I guess if her goal is wildly unrealistic for her level of competance and age, she’s doomed until she changes her attitude. And I think something like that is what I would have said.
Namkcalb* - any thoughts on my post? Just curious.
*I can’t see your username without reading it backwards and thinking about a scene in 30 Rock: Tracy wants an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony - an EGOT. He seeks out Whoopi Goldberg to get advice, since she has an EGOT. While she steps away, Tracy starts fingering her awards. Whoopi comes back in and says “Colored Man! Take your hands off before I teach you something!” (Or something like that). Tracy obeys immediately…
So I hear Whoopi in my head when I see your username. Makes me smile. Hope that’s okay.
Uhm… in Spain, a piano degree is divided into ten “year-long” courses, which can’t start until the student has taken two years of solfège. I don’t know what’s the difference between fourth and fifth, but it’s very, very rare to find someone who went beyond fourth (I know one person who did - no, I don’t know any professional piano players; the organist in my mother’s church only has second). Most of the people who get to that level took eight years or more, between the solfège and piano. Two of my college classmates had their fourths: one had taken eight years, the other nine, and those two were probably the smartest people in a class where smart was taken for granted.
Sounds pretty normal to me. I think she might be doing what one of my college roomies used to do when she moaned that she’d never make it “into the [tennis] pros”: “girl, tennis is paying for your schooling, your housing, your food and your clothes, in most of the world that doesn’t count as ‘amateur’!” (she had a tennis scholarship). The top of the heap will always have someone better than you but hey, compared with most of the world she’s the Pau Casals of pianos!