Advice for beginner struggles

Advice for beginner struggles

This leader has been dancing for 4 months. He is becoming frustrated because he is not retaining the knowledge taught.

It's always going to be hard for leads in the beginning because we're initiating the moves. It's going to be frustrating but don't get discouraged, just keep practicing and working on your basics. My biggest advice is to count outloud. The sooner you count the sooner the dance will start to "click." Another is to take smaller steps.

Try to perfect the basic moves: cross body lead, left turn, right turn, outside turn, inside turn and basic step. lot of patterns build off of those.

I know you want to do all the cool moves (I know I did) but it is very, very important that your basics are solid before advancing otherwise you are going to end up frustrated.

A mistake beginners make is to only go to classes and not go social dancing. Classes are where you go to memorize moves. Socials are where you actually practice dancing. A rough outline is: 3 hours of social dancing for one hour of class. Socials allow you to practice applying the moves you know again and again which helps commit them to memory (as opposed to doing something once in a class then moving on to a million other things).

On learning complex dance patterns : regardless of how much is taught in the lesson, choose the smallest segment that you can remeber (usually 8 to 16 counts) and decide "this is what I work on".
And focus on the small segment. Also Try to think how you can end combos early, like "if I just cross body lead here it's back to normal" go to at least one social before the next class and make sure to try that move on everyone at least once. Remind yourself of the move before the social, or even mid social, with the video

listen to the songs you hear at socials a bunch at home so you get used to the music

Maybe it is your instructors teaching style, that does not work with you. If you have another teacher in the area, maybe give them a try?
A different system (teaching wise) might work better for you.

dont be disappointed that other people might learn faster. Comparison is the Thief of Joy. Stay on it. It keeps getting better over time. And dont forget to smile and have fun :)

try to develop muscle memory of the moves. So do it really slowly at first, speak up in class and ask your instructor to correct you so that you're getting it right from the beginning, and then do it again and again until you don't actually need to think about the move itself. That gets rid of the memorising of left and right or names of moves.

Ask some of the more experienced dance to dance with you and then ask them for feedback at the end of the dance.

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