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Comment by bwanab | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't match my personal experience. I learned music at five and have been an active musician all my life, but languages have always bee hard for me.

I believe that music is much more related to computer languages - just instructional notations as opposed to natural languages.

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It matches my experience too, much to my frustration. I've studied music theory and composition for years and have composed a fair number of pieces. I can play piano and sing but have no interest in being a performer. My instrument is pen and paper (or midi controller, Finale, and Ableton).

I'm 3 credits short of a bachelor's degree because I've never been able to pass any foreign language course. 10 attempts. Languages go through my head like sand through a sieve. I even took a language proficiency test and the proctor said I did so badly that I could have achieved a better score through blind chance, randomly selecting answers.

I'm now married to a fluent Japanese speaker. Even with her help it doesn't make any difference, it just won't "stick" no matter how hard I try. She tells me my pronounciation is excellent, however.

The college I went to will not accept any substitutions, thus the frustration.

And yet I learn programming languages quickly.

I'm not down with your link between music and computer languages.

Music is performative while what makes success with computer languages is the ability to juggle abstractions at different levels of zoom. I don't see an overlap there other than the nominal "they are both langauges".

I think there's a disconnect in our statements. By music, you seem to refer to the artistic, creative, performance oriented activity. My reference, as I thought TFA was about, was to the notational aspect of written music. Listen to Bach if you want an example of "juggling abstractions at different levels of zoom".

But do you play by ear? I don't think sight reading would help at all. I had been playing music for years, sight reading, and had picked up no musical ear.

Now, I can happily play along with the radio, and pick up languages by sound quite well.

Except for German. And I live in Germany. German is just... schmooshy.

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