For me it’s time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don’t understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That’s it. I don’t understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn’t give you anything.
My wife will hear a song and go “Oh neat, it’s in 5/8.” And I’m like “How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?”
the question is where to start practising. i am absolutely terrible at most math; i can’t balance an equation to save my life, i tend to get all my trig backwards, and the only thing i consistently get right for calculus is that odd-power exponentials are assymmetrical. despite that i struggled my way up to differential equations and found that annoyingly, combinatorics and boolean algebra came naturally.
you are describing my experience with math almost 1:1, it’s uncanny… division is unintuitive, i’ve re-learned calculus from scratch like four times during my school career and none of the actual math made intuitive sense, trig never clicked. i’ve been doing computer graphics for like 6 years now and despite trig being everywhere i still need like 30 seconds to puzzle out what
sin(0)is for the thousandth time. but i aced combinatorics without even trying as soon as i heard that the funny fraction-looking thing with parentheses is called “n-choose-k”, and if you give me a boolean expression with 5 levels of nested parenthesis and i can simplify it in my head in seconds.i know, right?! like, a friend of mine was doing a homebrew computer project a year or so ago and had issue with some complex instruction logic in the alu or whatever, and without having done it for over a decade i just sketched up a karnaugh map and struck two terms out. i even confused myself with that one.