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<< So, in summary:
1. You cannot hope to learn taiji from books, videos, or on-line sources. 2. You probably can't even find a human to teach you. 3. Learn some other discipline. >>
Not quite what I said, but hey, give it a shot if you want. If you develop authentic internal skill from practicing something you've learned exclusively online or from a video, I'll be the first in line to shake your hand and applaud your enterprise and persistence. The odds are very much against in IMHO.
The real problem with being exclusively an autodidact is that you draw certain conclusions about what you should practice and how you should practice, and then you invest time, energy and effort in those practices, and if you're off then you are deliberately building a structure which may take you very far from your goal. Because physical structure and practice habits affect how you relate cognitively to your environment, they tend to be self-reinforcing, and you also tend to reject any information which calls into question what you've decided to invest in.
I went to a baguazhang seminar a couple of years ago at my teachers' taiji school, which was given by a very famous American bagua, xingyi, and taiji teacher and writer on the internal martial arts. One of the guys I was practicing with there had a very odd version of the palm change we were learning-very collapsed internally, not much of a root, poor connection and extension- his fingers, for instance, were very collapsed and couldn't support even moderate pressure. He insisted on trying to 'correct' other folks in the seminar, and when I asked him who his teacher was and how long he'd practiced, he said that he'd only been practicing for a couple of years and had just learned from books and videos, but he 'knew he was on the right track.' This kind of kidding yourself is very easy to fall into without a teacher.
It astonishes me less than it used to, but it still astonishes me that people honestly think they can learn a movement art as complex as taiji- which, after all, was designed by professionals for professionals-from books, videos, or websites alone. It depends on what your goals are, I suppose-you may just want to learn some choreography-but I assumed in my answer to your post that you wanted to invest some serious effort in acquiring a difficult, challenging, exciting skill set.
Lots of luck,
Jack Forster
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