Hi there....newbie to the forum and guitar playing.

My wife bought me a guitar (Yamaha F-310) six years ago for my 30th birthday and ever since then I have probably picked it up a dozen times or so, struggled to learn consistently for a week or two, only to pickup some house projects and quickly forget what I learned.

Well now I've decided to take a more serious approach. The first thing I did recently was to replace the steel strings with nylon strings. One of my biggest obstacles every time I picked up the guitar over the years is that my fingers start to kill me after 2-3 nights of playing due to the fact that they aren't constantly being calloused up. My assumption was that nylon strings are gentler than steel strings and so far I think that is holding true as my fingers are in better shape after a few days of playing than they would be with steel strings.

Last night my father-in-law was playing around with my guitar and commented on how narrow the neck is....he said I should try playing on a true classical guitar. Until then I never knew what a classical guitar was...I just assumed all acoustic guitars were the same. Secondly, I didn't know that neck widths varied in guitars and are especially wide on classical guitars (which mine is not...or at least is a wannabe because of the nylon strings I just put on it).

That's when the lightbulb in my head turned on.....I always find myself struggling to play notes & chords cleanly, awkwardly contorting my wrist to make sure each finger make contacts with a single string. I'm a big guy (6'3" 260 lbs.) with big clumsy fingers. Eventually as my wrist gets sore from being contorted my fingers make contact with neighboring strings and everything just starts to sound bad. Perhaps the solution to my problem is that I should be learning on a classical guitar with a wide neck instead.

Does this sound like something I should consider? If so, what would be a good classical starter guitar with a wide neck under $200. I don't want to play an electric guitar because the only time I have to practice is at night when my two kids (both under 5) are asleep, so I have to keep the volume down.

Another question I have is that I noticed Yamaha makes a 1/2 size and 3/4 size guitar. What advantage does not using a full size guitar give?

Thanks!