That seems compatible the language analogy. Don't both require the ability to hear, or have someone tell us, when something is not quite right? As long as I can hear my music doesn't sound right, or my accent in a foreign language is appalling, I can progress. Do some of us get to a point where we can no longer hear the errors and stop progressing however much immersion we have?
What you are describing is a skill set, observational skills.
Over decades of being a student in group classes, in multiple and varied (physical) disciplines, and all the years of teaching, a few things have be come really clear to me:
1. People’s powers of observation vary widely, and a great many watch but fail to see, listen but don’t hear.
2. The proportion of people with keen observational skills is trending downwards at an astonishing rate.
3. It can be REALLY difficult to get people to observe what is important in the sense of what you are trying to direct them to observe, because most people seem to observe with extreme prejudice. By that I mean they are looking or listening for what THEY want to see or hear, what THEY have already concluded is what you’re intending them to focus on, or what THEY think is the important aspect of a what is being demonstrated/played.
People are then also convinced they’ve observed whatever you just demonstrated, despite the fact that they completely missed it because they were focused elsewhere, be it on some other aspect of what you were doing, or on their own thoughts, or some other distraction.
Sometimes there’s a warping based on their preconceptions.
“Did you see/hear what I did?”
“Yes”
“Repeat what I did.” And they give it back differently.
“Is that what I showed you”?
“Yes.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes?”
I’ve found there’s a simple test for this: For a physical skill I ask “Tell Me, can you see a clear movie in your mind of me demonstrating that movement?” I already know they won’t be able to because if they could they would be able to replicate what I did. Any time someone can see the movie, they have observed and can replicate, or at least get in the ball park to the point where they can start refining, which then relies heavily on comparison skills, but we can’t go there just yet.
So with music it’s obviously the good old teacher plays a phrase and you sing in back, or as we used to quip back in my drumming days, if you can say it you can play it. However if you can’t sing back a musical phrase (lack of perfect pitch aside) then you didn’t accurately observe the phrase. In other words, your observation skills are holding you back, but people often mistakenly chalk it up to lack of musical aptitude, or some other issue.
At this point we could talk about which subset of observational skills in particular are holding the student up: Difficulty identifying relative pitches? Rhythm? And so on.
This is getting long so I’ll just touch on the comparison skills piece briefly. So whether it’s music, language, or movement, once we gain some mental clarity (another topic) through accurate observation, we proceed to gross aping of the thing we are trying to imitate. We have a bunch of neuromuscular familiarization and patterning to do in order to start getting into the ball park of the “ideal” or model that we are using to copy, but very quickly we need to bring strong comparative skills to bear on the challenge. From repetition to repetition we must observe, compare, and determine the differences between our performance and the model we are attempting to copy. This is hard work, and the closer you get to mimicking the thing you are trying to copy exactly, the more difficult it becomes to see/hear the ever smaller differences, until you are either successful, or you give up or fail because your observation and comparison skills weren’t up to the task. Alternately you could simply decide you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns and say enough is enough, even if you could continue to refine.
With things like music and language accents, it’s often a combination of weak observational and comparison skills, couple with the “good enough” mindset. In most cases it’s not like fighting, rock climbing, or flying aircraft where there are serious consequences to motivate you to clean up the rough edges.