terrible sight reading and not able to play by ear

[plain beacon]

hello, i have been playing piano for almost 4 years-ish by taking lessons from a piano teacher. but i still really cant sight read like amazing and i can barely play by ear. for my progress and time length, is this a terrible pace and what should i do to slowly progress even more?

[merry roost]

The first thing that I have to tell you is that playing by ear isn't a thing you can easily learn. (If at all) You are either born with it or you have spent countless hours working on it. (And even then you still might not be able to do it) You shouldn't worry too much about being able to play by ear because that ability can be quite rare. I would recommend that you try to acquire a strong relative pitch instead. (Relative pitch is essentially just perfect pitch, but not completely accurate.)

Here's a good website where you can train your pitch recognition: https://tonedear.com/ear-training/absolute-perfect-pitch-test

Secondly, in order to become better at sight reading you should PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE! What I personally do is I try to sight read music from a hymnal every day. However, it doesn't matter if you use a hymnal or not, you just need something from which you can reliably find music that you haven't played before. Start by doing a little bit at a time and then gradually increase how much you sight read. You'll likely find that in a few months your sight reading ability will have gone up quite a bit.

Finally, everyone has a different learning speed and what should be considered "terrible" is up to the discretion of each individual person. (i.e. pace is subjective.) Learn at the pace that you're comfortable with and not at the speed that other people say you should.

[plain beacon]

thank you so muchhh ! i will try to start practicing more and i learned alot from this. i really appreciate your help:)

[hollow citrus]

help one mistake is where i misclicked