Ask HN: Do you get impatient when learning new things?

I had the same problem. How did I solve it? First of all, I don't learn new stuff just for sake of learning new things - I am always trying to solve a problem, even the simplest one. Create simple requirements and keep trying to achieve your goal as soon as possible. Once your tests (even ugly ones) pass, you can start refactoring and make your code idiomatic for a given technology/language. At least it's my way of doing things.

This is a pretty big question. Learning has many flavours of frustrations that go with it. Here's one:

Learning itself is pleasant. I think we're wire to enjoy it. If you had a judo lesson now and learned a simple trip, you would have fun. Give most people their first programming lesson and they'll enjoy jumbling up letters or whatever you do.

Not knowing is unpleasant. In your first lesson you have no expectation. In the second, you double your knowledge. On the 20th, you are dealing with forgetting and you've accumulated bits you find difficult. You are still a beginner, but now you have expectations.

You can trip or throw a cooperative opponent but you keep repeating mistakes, frustration. There is still a gulf between where you are and scoring on an uncooperative opponent. You can jumble words, add numbers or record form data in your db. But, the gulf between doing that and writing your spaced learning iWatch app is big. Basically, you suck and you are judging your performance by the standards of a programmer, judo player or whatnot. Sucking.. sucks.

I'm about 5 weeks into learning a language and I'm in this spot right now. week one was really fun. Every lesson meaningfully improved my vocal, grammar, etc. I know about 1200 words and a decent amount of the basic grammar. You need about 2500 words before you can understand a simple paragraph or video snippet. I'm nearly useless outside of the context f a lesson translating single sentences. I can't think in the language (I translate) which means (A) it's difficult and frustrating and (B) I might understand your first sentence as you wrap up your third…even if I know all the words. None of the gammer is natural to me. etc. etc.

Basically, there's a massive gap between where I am and where it felt like I would now after the first lesson. Massive. Even if I conjure up discipline I didn't need in week 1 and push hard this week, I'll still suck. My vocal might go up to 1500, but I'll regress on something. It's whack-a-mole time where revision is 75% of the work and 50 new words is a drop in the ocean.

Thinking of it, I realize I might have taken the wrong side of the debate. Learnings sucks. I hate it.

But, for the sake of it I'll keep arguing this point. This expectation/reality gap is as irrational as it is inevitable. You know it how long it will to learn things in advance. I know I can't get fluent in a language in 25 hours of practice, but it does create frustration.

Since I'm not going with the "learning sucks, I hate it" conclusion, lets wrap up with stoicism. Good as any, ne? Do thy duty though the the skies fall down upon thee. Seek not vain pleasures of the moment. Rather, take comfort each day knowing that thou hath done thy work. Focusing on your goals to much can make learning emotionally hard (frustrating, etc.), unless your goal can be achieved very quick. If your goal requires 100 hours over 2 months, when you are 46 hours deep, you feel like you aren't making any progress. You are probably wrong, but it doesn't feel like it. Don't focus on the end goal, just do your 2 hours and pat yourself on the head. Good stoic. Nice stoic. Here's a Senecan biscuit. Well done.

I have this trouble with mathematical topics in isolation. It bit me in school as I was very good in most of my classes, but when I had to learn (for example) trig identities, and various rules in calculus in order to slog through problem sets, free of visualizations or some kind of real-world problem, my eyes would tend to glaze over. It has hit me in Haskell because I have tried very hard to understand some of the mathematical formalisms associated with monads, etc. but learning those in the abstract, from a page, without actually writing code to solve a specific problem, was very difficult for me. It's frustrating because I'd _like_ to be the kind of guy who can and does work through a pure math textbook on category theory or linear algebra or whatever, just for fun. But apparently I'm not. I learn best by actively beating my head against a real programming problem. If this is a programming thing you're trying to learn, my suggestion is to keep it tied to a real program.

If it is really severe, consider being evaluated for adult ADD. I probably have this in mild form and also what might be considered the opposite, obsessive compulsive personality disorder, which results in me veering between wanting to understand _everything_ and working obsessively on _one_ thing trying to get it textbook-perfect and understand it completely. This combination often intersects well with the requirements for my work but sometimes... not so much, as I either insist on solving a problem better that is already working well enough, or considering a whole range of possible approaches when I really just need to complete one, and quickly.

I get impatient reading about people who get impatient learning new things :) But honestly, if you suffer such impatience, try learning something more tactile like playing the guitar. You'll learn patience as well as learning the guitar.

You can use a saw to cut a stick in half, but you can also use it to create joinery. Learning something as complex as joinery -- and doing it well -- is necessarily going to take some time... even though you could probably teach an ape to use a saw.

Different learning resources have different goals. This is a book that is meant to be comprehensive, but also provides two different ways to approach learning the language. The target audience of this book was never intended to be someone who only wants to devote 20 lines of effort to learning a programming language. If that's what you want, read http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/rust/

Edit: But when you realize you can't grok language semantics like borrow checking or sum types for results, you might have to spend more than 20 lines of code to understand the usage and benefits of those concepts. This is when you move from sawing to joinery.