I'm with you! I see a lot of harmonica players online asking about circle of fifths and other theory-related things, and my answer is always the same. Buy a keyboard!

bocaholly said
@Gordon Shumway 

You play the harmonica too! Sounds like you play more instruments than languages you speak... and that's a few from what I've gathered   

I read them, I don't speak them, there's a big difference!

No, I did a little blues harp 10 years ago, but I'm not a willing harp player. At the uke club they've got me playing all the harp and horn bits (on the same harp) in Van Morrison's Bright Side of the Road, but I don't enjoy it - it's too demanding, and when you go wrong, recovery is too difficult. And there'a fiddle part in it too! I don't want to be practising harp when I could be practising the fiddle! I'd rather just do Western Swing numbers on the fiddle and leave the harps at home. Although we do have a couple of simpler harp numbers that I enjoy, such as Glendale Train and How Sweet it is (to be loved by you).

Somewhere there must be an analysis of how the two instruments compare, and whether one is harder than the other.

As a beginner, I know that the violin is more technical to start with than the piano, but then I assume it will level out. Otoh, it won't level out if you go on to Paganini caprices and so on.

Otoh, the piano isn't about pressing a key and music comes out. Try playing a 4-part Bach fugue and making each line sing independently! Listen to Glenn Goold playing the Goldberg variations.

People make similar comparisons between languages. Something you'll see is "English is easy to begin with and impossible to perfect, whereas German is impossible to begin with and easy to perfect." Ha, I understand that one, and it's not untrue.

But something that's untrue is that Italian is easy. Italian has 7 or 8 word-suffixes indicating size or beauty, and each word has correct suffixes and incorrect ones, and the size ones can be flattering or insulting, depending. Use the wrong one to the wrong person about the wrong thing and you'll be very friendless. Ignore them and you may as well be speaking pigeon Italian.

So every language is as difficult as every other (socio-linguistically speaking). How do we compare piano and violin? Probably every instrument is as difficult as every other. No, maybe not - I even know a violist who admits her instrument was a cop-out, lol!

(Sorry, only got 2 hours' sleep. waffling. And I will buy a viola one day)

DennisS said
the idea of playing an accordion became an embarrassment among my peers! 

Peer pressure can be good or bad. You have to be yourself among your peers. Look at Vivian Stanshall ("the only teddy boy to speak the Queen's English"). 

I'm basically a classical musician who has taken a superficial interest in pop music since the mid 60s, but never really settled upon anything in particular. Peer-pressure tends to dictate what I like, and every now and then a change of peers can be refreshing. That sounds callous, but my school friends all became heavy drug users, and I couldn't follow them, so I had to give them the boot eventually, and that made for an interesting change in musical scenery that felt like a burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

That was about 15 years ago when I found I could listen to anything I liked without anyone telling me it was good or bad.

Now my peers (one of whom deliberately took up ukulele aged 13 when all his peers took up guitar) mean I like a lot of 1930s and 1940s popular music which I'd never thought of listening to before.

I had never liked folk music (except for things like Tim Buckley, if you call that folk), but one of my uke peers is a bassist who is playing at Cropredy next year, so I have hopes his group will want a fiddler one day. However, normally very effusive, the only time he has ever blanked anything I've said was on the two occasions when I suggested his group might need a fiddler. Lol! Obviously the only way forward is for me to get good enough to make him change his mind.