The Martial Arts Don't Teach You How to Fight?

This is a type of question I get a lot from new students who have a background in fighting;

"What does Taijiquan do against a jab?"
"What does Karate do in ground fighting?"
...and so forth.

The answer to both these questions is "nothing." A Taijiquan practitioner would (or should) know what to do against a jab, but that is fighting, not martial arts.

Before you start writing hate mail, give me a chance to explain.

Jab, cross, enter, grapple, etc. is basic fighting. With a few exceptions, basic fighting looks the same everywhere in the world and has done for a long, long time.

The "Martial Arts" build on basic fighting. They assume you already know how to fight. Either your teacher would teach you basic fighting, or you would arrive at your teacher's door already knowing how to fight.

The martial arts teach you clever tricks to make your basic fighting superior. That's what the word "art" is doing in there.

So, Taijiquan's clever tricks, for example, work against an attack that has a certain amount of body weight committed to it. Jabs don't have body weight behind them, so Taiji wouldn't work against them even if you were fast enough to respond. A good Taiji practitioner would deal with a jab the same way a boxer would, then continue to fight until the opponent throws a committed attack.

Fights don't happen the way applications happen in the classroom. Most martial artists never study real fighting, so they don't know how their art fits into it. This is why you hear so many stories about proficient martial artists who fail in a street fight. Your martial art didn't fail you; your teacher failed you.