Difficulty converting between written notation and sounds
As a native English speaker, I have never learned to recognize where the stress on the word is. I know that I pronounce the words correctly, including the stress, but if you asked me which syllable in a word took the stress I would be unable to tell you.
I also have problems with the duration of the notes in music. I would struggle to convert the duration to the sound. I find that in order to play a song, I do much better if I can hear the song first, which lets me know how much time each note takes.
I also have problems with pitch. Were I to hear a melody, I would often not be able to tell you whether the pitch drops or rises from one note to the next, or if it stays the same. Yet, I can hum the melody perfectly.
Now with learning Japanese, I have difficulty converting the pitch accent--in Japanese, a lot of words have a point where the pitch stops rising and begins to fall--from the written form to the spoken form. In addition, if I heard a word, I would not be able to tell you where the drop in the pitch accent occurs, a problem similar to that mentioned in the last paragraph, where I cannot tell if the pitch is rising or falling or staying the same, so it would be very difficult to test my pitch accent against written sources. I don't know how good my pitch accent is, though native speakers, when I speak to them, often ask me if I've lived in Japan.
Does anyone else have this problem?
EDIT: Now, granted, when playing an instrument like the piano, I know which key to press with each note.
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"You have a responsibility to consider all sides of a problem and a responsibility to make a judgment and a responsibility to care for all involved." --Ian Danskin
