> Not only do you not know how to parse this without further knowledge, you also can't pronouce it in a meaningful way... Therein often lies the problem, if yo

> Not only do you not know how to parse this without further knowledge, you also can't pronouce it in a meaningful way... Therein often lies the problem, if you mentally cannot translate the symbols into meaningful concepts it's hard or impossible to work with them. For example, there are primitive tribes who's language only has words for the amounts of one, two and three. All amounts above that are simply referred to as 'many', no matter if it's four or a hundred. These people cannot (or at least not easily) be thought basic mathematics because they probably can mentally picture 2+2=4 being different from 2+3=5. So if you can find words for these symbols or make up words for your own for that matter and are able to read this expression in these words it will be a lot easier to parse and understand, maybe even intuitively. edit: another example in the Python domain for me would be list and dict comprehensions. When I first encountered them in other people's code I had a hard time understanding what they did. Searching for them was also hard, since I could only describe them (ie: loop within square brackets) and not name them. Finally when I found their name in an reply on SO I was able to search directly for the concepts and find meaningful answers on how to apply them in certain cases.