This was my experience learning music theory. So much of the reference material tries to describe the motion of notes while not providing any visuals. I guess that works for a lot of people, but I didn't really get stuff like chords and scales and the relationship between them until I spent years painting notes out on a scale-snapped MIDI roll.

I still can't make sense of what they're talking about half the time despite being on the other side of it, regularly using concepts they try to explain, but I let my inability to follow that way of explaining be a road block to learning-by-doing for way too long.

See also: math. I thought I was bad at it! It turns out the books in school and the teachers just didn't teach it in a way I could follow. It's a weird inversion of my usual problem. For most things, I learn best with text and illustration and struggle to follow videos. For math, I can't follow text and most illustrations might as well be blank, but videos work. It's the same with music: I made most of my progress from watching videos.

I would implore anyone who thinks they're "bad at math" or they "can't learn to make music", or anything they struggle with, to skip the ways they've tried in the past and go at it from another angle. There are so many angles. So many.

Yes! Very true. I found that I get distracted easily when reading, stopping at an unfamiliar term/concept, looking it up, possibly taking notes, annnddd then not really getting back to what I was reading.

Now, I read differently, where I _read to finish_; I try to minimize the time-to-big-picture.

Ive found reading with a pen or pencil to be helpful. I also sometimes prematurely seek out an answer to some piece of text that’s expounded on a few lines later. So my recipe now is, open book (or whatever), write the date and time, read the table of contents, read through and annotate, write questions and answers in the margins, and get to the other cover quickly; each time I pick up the text I read over something I previously noted (in fifo order). These second passes are slow, the first pass continues at the same speed.

Interestingly, there is a lot of good advice on this in various writings on learning to read Latin fluently. Word order is very free due to the language's inflected nature, and of course, vocabulary requires constant attention.

The most highly regarded advice to breaking through into fluency is to break the habit of re-reading just as you get into trouble, or breaking off to look up a word. Instead, push through to the end of the sentence, holding as much of it in your head as possible, and being ready to re-interpret any chunks (phrases or clauses) that might admit of more than one interpretation. When you've reached the end of the sentence, consider what you think was meant by it. Only then, go back and re-read the sentence. In some cases, it may be necessary to read more than a single sentence together.

At any rate, I think a lot of people agree with your observation.