I agree with what Raul says (and I know it works, too, because he was my
main teacher as I was learning J).
The J Dictionary is brief and brilliant; if you're committed to learning
all of J you might want to start there; but some readers are reminded of
what Macaulay said about Seneca, that "reading him straightforward is
like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce".
NuVoc is intended as an easier introduction: much longer, but perhaps
easier to follow.
And if you haven't found the Dissect addon, I recommend using it to help
visualize the execution of sentences.
[full disclosure: I wrote Dissect and had a hand in writing NuVoc]
Henry Rich
On 3/13/2016 1:32 PM, Raul Miller wrote:
My tip would be: dip into the language each day - try to find
something fun and interesting, of course, but a half hour a day over
the course of a week will often do more for you than an intense 4 hour
session.
(Those intense 4 hour sessions, or longer, can be fun, but I would let
them happen rather than trying to force them.)
Also... Ken Iverson was faced with a really difficult task, when
writing the dictionary: how do you introduce ideas which are
inter-related?
Getting a person up to speed is tricky, since there's no really great
starting point which does not benefit from ideas presented elsewhere.
So... dictionary format - the reference documentation goes into some
significant detail, but you'll have to do several iterations on
everything, with some trial and error and mistakes, before you start
seeing some of the important interconnections. (And then you'll
sometimes be at a loss for how to explain some of these "incredibly
obvious" ideas to other people... such is life... or math... or
something...)
(Also, there's the labs and plenty of non-dictionary documentation,
some of which will be not quite what you're looking for.)
Hopefully you already had an idea about this, and I am just reminding you.
Thanks,
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