Anki won't really help here. Flashcards work for natural languages because there's a huge vocabulary that you have to learn (10k words minimum for 'simple spee

Anki won't really help here. Flashcards work for natural languages because there's a huge vocabulary that you have to learn (10k words minimum for 'simple speech'). Sheet music is written with a very small "vocabulary": 12 notes that just repeat up and down the keyboard; a few dozen common symbols for dynamics, articulation, etc; a handful of note "lengths"; and that's about it. The hard parts are getting your fingers to actually execute what they need to do, sight reading, ear training, and--most importantly--music interpretation. Ear training is the only aspect where I could see software helping. My advice: 1) Definitely get a teacher, even if you only see them every other week. The function of the teacher isn't to "teach" per se--you'll be doing most of your "learning" in practice anyway--but you need someone to check up on you every once in a while to catch and break bad habits that you don't know you're even forming yet. 2) The most effective practice is the kind of practice that's extremely directed, focused... and boring. Practicing scales, trills, and arpeggios. Playing one bar of music over and over slowly until it's memorized and you can play it perfectly 10x in a row, then moving to the next bar. Every once in a while you have to put everything together to practice musicality, but that's generally going to be a small fraction of your practicing hours. 3) If you actually want to learn efficiently, you have to put in a pretty solid, consistent effort, i.e. 1h every day for you, 30min every day for young kids. Doing a bit here and there is like exercising once in a while: you just spend all your time losing muscle memory and regaining it with little forward progress. It took me 11 years of half-assed practice as a kid to play ARCT (university-level) piano, but only about a year as a young adult to get my flamenco guitar up to about 70% of that level. The difference? As an adult you can sit yourself down and slog through the boring stuff in order to save yourself time in the long run. 4) Keyboard is fine, but it has to be one of those high end, full size, weighted keyboards with synthetic ivory keys, etc (roughly $1-2k). These are usually marketed as "digital pianos", not "keyboards". The cheap half-length, unweighted, plastic key keyboards with tons of knobs and sound effects (e.g. $200-400) aren't meant to be used for playing piano. Those are more meant to be MIDI controllers for triggering synths, etc.