Originally Posted by
robt
I would say the best way to get into it is to find the local teachers in your area, phone them all and have a brief chat about what you want to get out of it, what sort of class they run, etc. The most important thing ultimately is the quality of the teacher and that's largely going to be a matter of personal preference based on personality.
There are 3 main styles of taijiquan: Yang, Wu and Chen. The most common of these in the west is Yang style. All of the main simplified forms are based on Yang style, so if you were to start out with something like Beijing-24 or CMC-37, but later decided you wanted to do a long form, it would be pretty easy to transition to a Yang long form, then learn the weapons forms or whatever else might be missing from the simplified forms. But for the first few years, any of the forms would be effective. In fact the reason simplified forms exist is so that students can get the most benefit as quickly as possible.
What is not easy to do is transition between styles. Switching between Yang style and Wu style will involve un-learning a lot of stuff, so that is best avoided.
I would not recommend Chen style to anyone unless they are under 30 and reasonably fit. Chen involves a lot of things like very low stances and sudden, explosive movements, which tend to lead to joint injuries. The other styles either omit these things altogether, or move them outside of the main forms where they are less likely to cause harm.
Ideally, you want to find a teacher who knows at least one long form, applications and some weapon forms, even if that's not what they normally teach. It implies they are a more well-rounded teacher. But in some cases a well-qualified teacher and a good teacher aren't the same thing, so YMMV.
Another thing very closely related to taijiquan is qigong (or ch'i kung; pronounced "chee-goong"). A simplistic translation of this is "energy work". I won't go into the technical details, suffice to say that they are similar, but qigong is not a martial art. Taiji is more of a complete system, whereas each qigong is designed to focus on one particular thing, like an isolation exercise (but not in the same sense). There are hundreds of them. They are relatively short and repetitive, at least compared to taiji (although not compared to say, crunches or press-ups). Some taiji schools will practise a lot of qigong. Some will do a few as warmups or cooldowns. Some won't do any at all. You may find the same teacher runs separate taiji and qigong classes.
Some people might prefer to focus on qigong because they are short and except for a few complicated ones, pretty easy to learn. Personally I don't like them much, because they are quite repetitive. They also don't have a lot of scope to improve technically, in much the same way that you can do press-ups badly, but once you know how to do them correctly it's just a question of doing hundreds of them. With qigong you do the same short sequence over and over until you get bored (or tired) and move on to another one. With a taiji form, its one long sequence and it forces you to really focus on what you're doing.
The main advantage of qigong over taiji is that if you find one you don't like, you can just not do it. If you don't like (or can't do) part of a taiji form, you can't really skip it.