If you are mostly wanting to play written classical music, you might consider just not learning "theory" per se. Much of what you might learn studying theory d

If you are mostly wanting to play written classical music, you might consider just not learning "theory" per se. Much of what you might learn studying theory directly has little application for musicians early in their practice. My experience (as a practicing musician who works in several generas) is that theory is great when it's explaining things you already kind of understand, and that gaining understanding comes from a lot of playing and performing things other folks have written. That is, first we learn the music by ear or eye, then we have a feeling for what sounds "right" in some situations, then we find a theoretical explanation for that feeling so we can replicate it quickly. If you're just wanting to get to where you read faster, more reading is the answer, and lots of sight reading easy material. The more you do this, the more patterns you'll see and the logic of what you're seeing will be easier to understand. To your question, though, a jump start on "learning theory" can be had by learning to play songs off lead sheets (like the Real Book or (better) the Great Gig Book). This Django book is an example of what I mean: https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/jazz_band/sheet/fakebook_django_2008.pdf https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/jazz_band/sheet/fakebook... It may seem daunting and it might seem like if you're just wanting to read faster or learn theory that it's a bad path. However, the process of learning the chords in a tune, figuring out which inversions work for the progressions, having to figure out a bass line that work, and being able to play with ornamentation can be an excellent playground for generating the kinds of questions that music theory can help answer.