There is a complaint I hear more than almost any other from adults teaching themselves, and it always arrives with an apology attached: I know where the notes are, but I still have to work out every single one. Shouldn't this be automatic by now?
It is worth saying plainly that this is not a sign of a bad memory, a late start, or an unmusical brain. It is a sign that you have been practicing the wrong skill — and that nobody told you there were two different skills, because the distinction is normally made in a lesson, out loud, by someone watching your eyes.
Naming notes is not reading
When you look at a note and think that line is G, so I press this key, you are decoding. Decoding is letter-by-letter translation: symbol to name to key. It is slow by construction, and it does not get faster with repetition, because every note is a fresh puzzle.
Reading is something else. A fluent reader is not naming notes any more than you are naming letters when you read this sentence. They are seeing shapes and distances, and their hand is answering the shape.
The uncomfortable part: months of decoding practice build a faster decoder, not a reader. You can get genuinely quick at it and still be stuck, which is exactly why so many adults describe hitting a wall that no amount of effort seems to move.
What a reader actually sees
Three things, none of which involve the alphabet.
The distance from the last note. Up a step, down a third, a leap of a fifth. Your hand does not need to know that the note is called B; it needs to know it is two notes above where your finger already is. Music moves mostly by small steps, so most of the time the answer is the very next key or skip one. A reader who sees intervals is reading ahead of their hands. A decoder is always one note behind.
Where the note sits on the staff, as a picture. Line or space, high or low, near the middle or out at the edge. This is a visual fact you can take in at a glance, without language.
A few landmarks, known cold. Not all thirty-five notes. Four or five: middle C, the G that the treble clef curls around, the F that the bass clef's two dots surround, the C an octave above and below middle C. Everything else is measured from a landmark. That is how everyone does it, including people who have been reading for forty years — they simply do it so fast that it looks like recognition.
The practice that builds it
Read intervals out loud instead of note names. Take four bars of something well below your playing level. Do not play it. Go along the line saying up a step, up a step, down a third, same note, up a fourth. Two minutes of this is worth an hour of naming notes, because it trains the thing you actually use.
Read music that is far too easy, every day, for five minutes. This is the single biggest omission in self-teaching, and the reason is understandable: easy music feels like a waste of a short practice session. But fluency comes from volume at a level where you never stop, and you cannot build volume on material that makes you stop every bar. If you are grinding through a piece at the edge of your ability, you are practicing decoding again. Go back several levels — far enough that it feels almost insulting — and play new pieces at sight, one after another, badly, without repeating them.
Never write the letters above the notes. I understand completely why people do it, and it is the most reliable way to guarantee that reading never becomes automatic. Your eye learns to go to the letter. The note underneath stops being information. If a passage is too hard to read without them, the passage is too hard — take something easier, which is not a retreat but the actual method.
Do not look down at your hands. Find the key by feel, using the black-key groups as your map: two blacks, three blacks, two blacks. Every time your eyes leave the page you lose your place and have to decode from a standstill. This feels impossible for about a week and then becomes normal.
Keep going when you get it wrong. When you are reading, a wrong note is not an event. Stopping to fix it teaches your eyes that the music halts whenever something goes wrong, and it is the habit that makes sight-reading in front of anybody unbearable later. Play the wrong note, keep the beat, move on.
Separate your two kinds of practice
This is the practical change that helps most, and it costs nothing.
Split your session in two. In one part you are learning a piece — slow, stopping, repeating small places, polishing. In the other part you are reading — easy material, new every time, never repeated, never stopped, never perfected. Five minutes is enough.
Most adults do only the first and then wonder why the second never developed. They are different activities that happen to use the same instrument.
How long it takes
Longer than learning where the notes are, and much less time than people fear once they are practicing the right thing. Reading is a volume skill: it responds to how much new music has passed under your eyes, and barely at all to how hard you concentrated. Five honest minutes a day for a few months will change it. Two hours on a Sunday will not.
And if you have been at this for a year and reading is still slow, the probable cause is not the year. It is that nothing in the year was sight-reading — it was all learning pieces, which is a different thing entirely.
The part you cannot check alone
You can follow every word above without help. What you cannot see is your own eyes. Almost everybody who is told to stop looking at their hands is convinced they have stopped, and a recording from the side shows the head dropping at every leap.
So put your phone at the side of the keyboard, where it sees your hands and your face rather than the page, read something easy for two or three minutes, and send it. The written feedback is free, and it will tell you what your eyes and hands are actually doing — which is the one thing you cannot observe from inside your own playing.