But things like sight reading come very naturally to me. I read music the way that I read a language. I don’t have to think hard at all to recognize notes, chords, etc and then to play them. So my ability to pick up a new song is faster than even my wife, who is about an order of magnitude better than me. She can transpose songs, learn songs by listening to them, the whole gamut. But in that one small area of sight reading, I can pick up a moderately complex song pretty quickly relative to my wife, despite the fact that I practice much less frequently than her. It must have something yo do with how the brain is wired or some sort of hand eye coordination, but it’s very interesting how I perceive sheet music vs her.
It was the same for me until I really started practicing sight reading (there are special books for that). Just like learning the alphabet and how to read as a child, it took a couple of years of doing sight reading many days a week before I got good enough to sight read musical pieces. Becoming fluent at reading takes a lot of practice. And like learning to read and write in any language, it's best to do it at the same time while you are learning to speak and understand.
The gaps is the treble clef are
| F | A | C | E |
F | A | C | E | G |
bass clef (C) treble clef
F | A | C | E | G | | | F | A | C | E |
For some reason when people learn a foreign language they tend to start with the written language, and actually holding a conversation or understanding a native speaker is often a less prominent part of learning. This, to me, is a lot like thinking that learning music starts with reading a score and studying up on music theory, when you actually already have an intuitive understanding of music because you’ve listened to it all your life, and should probably focus on building similar intuition for expressing yourself with an instrument.
Imagine trying to learn to read English, and instead of seeing words, you see a bunch of letters and have to decipher each letter. I'd almost describe it as dyslexia for musical notation or something (which isn't a problem for me when reading text). I can recognize C,D,E,F,G pretty instantly because of their position relative to the bottom bar of the treble clef, but as soon as you start getting above that, I start having to count spaces relative to a known position, because everything internal looks like a big jumble. So G-B-E (on the treble clef) is easy because I see G as the base, and then the other two notes are space by two, but if it's just B-E without the context of the G, I have to stop and figure out exactly where those notes fall. And as soon as I get below C (on the treble clef), I start having to stop to count the separator lines.
But if I can hear what I'm trying to play, I can usually just jump to the correct note/chord. Maybe I'll have to stop and experiment to get the right chord periodically, but I don't have to stop and analyze the position of each dot on the score. To me, the greatest value of sheet music for me has always been in keeping place, so I associate the location of specific patterns on a specific page, and based on all the context, and know that I'm supposed to be at this point in the song that I've already taken the time to memorize beforehand. But I'm pretty much never paying attention to the actual notes on the notation at that point.