The analogy can be taken too far; if you can recognise a note by sight on sheet music, you’ve learnt everything there is to directly memorise in paying an instr

The analogy can be taken too far; if you can recognise a note by sight on sheet music, you’ve learnt everything there is to directly memorise in paying an instrument. All the rest is practice. This is not the case in language learning. A language which is not closely related to one you already know has tens of thousands of words, the meanings of which can’t be deduced from other things. There is no use to doing listening practice if you do not understand almost all the words being used; you will be stuck looking them up one at a time in a dictionary. It is also very difficult to correctly pick out words you don’t know in a language you are new to.