yeah, it's hard when you're first starting off. a few thoughts

- i find that it's easier to learn when you set a goal. ie, “i want to make a webpage that shows me statuses where people have mentioned me on Twitter and Tumblr”. “i want to survive for two weeks in japan without English”

- once you learn enough with a single language (the basics of coding and language and program structure), it's easy to learn most of the others. in that sense, it's not like learning a natural language. ie, the jump from python to ruby is many times easier than the jump from English to Spanish (i think)

- you can make something from nothing. how awesome is that?

oh for sure. i am definitely in the “it's fun” category.

as for chinese, it's not completely singular – you can transition to japanese fairly seamlessly (written only though) and once you understand the construction of asian languages it's easier to pick up others (chinese dialects, japanese, korean, etc.).

thanks! yeah, you're right – i still have a Chinese dictionary that I use whenever I go back, but I know exactly what to look for and how to find it, as opposed to when I first got there and even the dictionaries themselves didn't make sense.

if anyone can get through to the untrained masses, it's you. i think that would be super fun and *when* i move back to NYC i will be in attendance.

have found these two video sets really helpful: http://bit.ly/d4o5qs and http://bit.ly/Dkk11 for conceptual stuff and intro projects that I think are fun usually involve doing something cool with the API for a product you already use (you wouldn't happen to know of any APIs that fit that description now would you? heh).

This is great to hear and thanks for the links – really appreciate hearing how your experience has been and glad you're enjoying the adventure!

Amanda,

I just found your blog for the first time through a friend's tweet, and really dig this post. I find myself in a similar position as you, and just recently started learning PHP.

I really agree with your conclusion “And once you make it through mastering the fundamentals, your ability to learn new concepts improves exponentially.” That's what has kept me going as I've been busy with so many other things and want to lay down my PHP books.

To build on this point a bit, often times yes “there’s someone you can hire who can do it in 5 minutes” as you mention, but many times if you want to launch your own startup it's important to know technical capabilities and at least have a sense of what's going on. I think by having a basic understanding of programming this greatly would increase your ability to manage a coder. I'm working on a few side projects with outsourced coders, and often times feel limited by their delays and coding methods. The desire to be able to take their basic work and then fine tune it to my project is what is really keeping me going with it.

What language are you starting with?

Jon

I found that my own learning experience with programming was that at each new level, the concepts I had known before – the simplistic “rules” that you'll see blithely repeated across the web – had to be broken to accommodate an expansion of reality.

Natural language has many of those characteristics – idioms and preferences of formality come to mind – but they're buried underneath the emphasis on vocabulary. Vocabulary isn't a huge deal in programming because you're either working off a reference(API docs or old source code) or you're making it up as you go along.

For that reason, I always recommend that new programmers work through the fundamental CS literature – TAOCP, SICP, Little Schemer, etc. The concepts in CS are universal, but specific domains of application – Web apps, games, operating systems, etc., each rely heavily on a certain subset of those concepts, thus to get really good you have to write a variety of apps as well as study the literature.

Bravo, Amanda.

A dirty secret: even a lot of full-time programmers (I almost said “professional programmers”, but I think they don't qualify) skip the bopomofo stage. And they think that's fine, because they can order dumplings with a fair bit of success.

But as a guy who gets called in to sort out problems, I can tell you that a lot of teams suffer because nobody is willing to go back to basics. What's the processor up to? What's happening at the level of bits in RAM, of packets on the network, of physical movements of the disk drive?

Those fine details seem irritatingly basic when you're just trying to get that form to display. But, like your own breathing and heartbeat, just because you can ignore it a lot of the time doesn't mean it isn't critically important.

I plan to keep it up to date for as long as I work in this field and I have seen time after time how non-technical management can really screw up projects and lack empathy.

Yeah, I do love the role of “the fixer” – mostly because I've always been drawn to very complex problems. But then, you have to know the entire system before you can actually fix something well. So it's a process, for sure.

My class didn't have to spend that long on learning piyin at all o.o

Use emacs. That is more than enough to get you through.
Learning and using emacs is like learning and using kanji/chinese characters. That is how you get through the whole stack, of course really going through the whole “stack” is way too much. You have to start imagining things.

Sorry this what occurred to me after reading your post.

Also, I though that learning japanese first, and later chinese made chinese seem to be a hundred times easier. Maybe because chinese grammar seemed to be easier than japanese.

Living in Beijing now, and doing a lot with the LAMP stack, I had a good chuckle at your post. We all learn differently and I'm self taught Chinese/PHP/Whatever. In coding, once I figured out the structure, I didn't try and memorize everything, I just had to know where to find it.

I also made sure I had some “cookbooks” and a good framework like CakePHP so I'm not re-inventing the wheel (and security holes) at every late night shift. It also mean't, that I was having fun which one of the most important things.

Sure – and I think it's the structural part that is the most crucial but also the most frustrating.

Hope you're enjoying Beijing! I miss it.

Wow, they do “bopomofo” in Beijing? I thought it is a completely Taiwanese thing to teach kids to read, and to have one more way of typing…

And maybe it's hard to write respectable code, because things are changing much faster than to settle in any language for long enough time?

Hi Amanda,

Just on the Chinese front, most people who pick up Chinese in China end up with decent tones so it isn't true you need to start from bopomofo. I'd be irritated with any school that did that to me or anyone I know. The school shouldn't be holding back the student.

In the case you're still looking to keep up your Chinese, I'd suggest checking out Popup Chinese (http://popupchinese.com). Our users make a lot of progress quickly, but they're not babied on their way up the ramp which seems to make a real difference.

Best,

–david

I said if you learned the fundamentals first, then the language itself is just the syntax. The fundamentals are the flowcharts, pseudocode, the theory of an object, etc. Once you learn and understand the fundamentals then you can move on to any language.

“over the next 5 years I can learn enough of the LAMP stack to be dangerous.”

That takes less than 1 minute and is achieved by simply the boot of L in LAMP.

Also, those that dont stick with it are just like anybody else with anything else, they either grok it too soon (not likely with programing) and get bored or it becomes “too much work” and lately people just hate that.

It takes 10K hours at something to get to a professional level. Want to learn blues guitar and be as good as BB King, you have a long road ahead of ya.

Point being, doing what you love for those your love turns work into something thats easy. For you, ….. do you love pc's, servers, hardware, technology, and being a Shaman with all of them so to speak….then programming might be something fun for you!

If not, be honest with yourself. You are only competing with yourself, everyone else can f'off.

Good luck, onward and upward with your bad self.