2008/11/21 Julian Leviston <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > If you want to learn Japanese, you can do courses, and you can ask > people (in English) how to talk in Japanese, but it's not going to > help you one WHIT at actually having functional skill in the language. > > To learn the language, you have to TRY TO USE IT.
I know everyone is sick of me here, but learning languages is a perfect example of how people really learn and accomplish something. Keep in mind learning a programming languages usually 1000 times easier thing to do compared to natural languages. I study Italian. I have no idea why, I just like learning languages. How I do it, you ask? I listen to some radio shows in Italian, understand nothing, read a few lessons in a textbook, next day I listen to it again. After a week I started to understand certain sentences. I feel myself extremely stupid every time I listen to the program. But I also understand that if I get all the fancy language coursed you can find today, if I start studying with the best teachers I can find in my area, but then *do not really push hard enough*, I won't learn a thing. So fancy text books and other fancy things are ignored intentionally. In contrast, if I continue using one textbook and listen to the same radio show for months and months, one day I'll be understanding it all. Key word here is *listen for months and months*, *doing*, this is what most people do not do. Instead, they build themselves a castle in the air, trying to imagine how *awesome* they will be if they ask "senior people" and get all the fancy IDEs/textbooks/etc. They collect gazillions of books and links they never read, install 20 IDEs they never use, try to follow "best git workflows" and "best git practices" where Mercurial with a single branch will do, and so forth. Don't do it. Don't fool yourself. So if you ask my heart advice without bitching about newbies, here it goes. Forget about fancy IDEs, "best tutorials", "best operating system to develop on". Pick first text editor you can find (on Linux and Mac I'd recommend Vim since it's there by default, and I am a die hard Emacs junkie: it does not matter when you learn), imagine what would be a fun thing to do for you and get lost. Never come back to any mailing lists until your goal is completed and you are ready to share your experience with others. This is how Merb, Mongrel and a lot of other projects started. -- MK --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "merb" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/merb?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
