I’m a beginning piano player. I am having trouble with dotted quarter note timing. I know they are a beat and a half but I have trouble making that happen at the keyboard when I haven’t heard the piece before.
I remember reading somewhere word phrases that equate the timing of the syllables in the phrase to the timing of music phrases.
Are there any tricks for nailing the timing of a music phrase?
Try thinking of the phrase in (tied) eighth notes. It’s a lot easier to imagine a dotted quarter as three eighth notes than it is “one and a half beats.” (What’s half a beat? Tap it out for me. See?)
Heh. I’m another one who can’t count…what I usually resort to is shouting ONE-and-TWO-and-THREE-and-FOUR-and while vigorously slamming my foot into the floor. 
Or you could get a metronome…let’s say your piece is in 4/4. So then you set it to twice as fast as you want to go, so it gives you eight beats per measure, and do what Doug suggests about counting eighth notes.
Yeah, Llarona said; that’s what the “and-a” is for.
Thanks for the replies. Yeah, I usually tap the foot fairly slow and loud until I work it out. I haven’t thought about double timing the metronome. Maybe that will help. I thought there was a word trick that helped. For example say the word Misssss-i-siiiiiip-iiiii and it has a certain rythym that equates to a musical phrase so that you can see the notation on paper and immediately work it out in your brain without all the foot tapping.
I remember being taught “CHO-co-late” as a way to play triplets. It’s been ~25 years since I learned how to play triplets, so I don’t remember how effective it was, but it’s stayed in my head all these years!