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I feel exactly the same, I've been learning a second language and it's nothing like learning programming, in fact arguably the opposite, I've found that obsessi

I feel exactly the same, I've been learning a second language and it's nothing like learning programming, in fact arguably the opposite, I've found that obsessing over grammar is almost detrimental to making progress with a new language. The confident students who aren't concerned with getting all the specifics of grammar exactly perfect are the ones that are making the most progress toward being conversational, they're able to express themselves and actually have something resembling a conversation, despite using the wrong prepositions here and there or conjugating verbs wrong sometimes. The more "academically" minded students who obsess over getting the grammar correct like a math equation are still struggling to form even basic sentences outside of solving homework problems on a piece of paper. I've noticed that I've been making much better progress now that I've been focusing on just trying to express myself even if I'm making mistakes. Which is obviously the complete opposite of using a programming language.

colmvp 6y ago
Interesting. I feel like coding is not that dissimilar. In the early phases of learning a new coding language, I learn how to write lines of code. Sometimes it compiles, most of the time it would cause errors. At some point it works, but a more seasoned engineer could easily find places to refactor it in order to make it more extensible/flexible, easier to read, less brittle, and most importantly to this discussion on coding language, more idiomatic. Now, you could say surely I could've seen these by reading the docs and learning about certain library features or patterns specific to the language. But in my experience, I tend to learn faster by first exercising my brain and trying it out on my own take before having someone (be it a mentor or a tutorial/book) correct me so that I have a bit more context about why an alternative approach is better.
- godelski 6y ago
  I don't understand this. If your code has wrong syntax it doesn't compile. If wrong grammar you can get very wrong results. But in english you can say "I go store" and it's understandable (which btw, can be a direct translation from several languages)
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    > If your code has wrong syntax it doesn't compile. If wrong grammar you can get very wrong results. In both cases, when you get it that wrong that your meaning doesn’t come across correctly, it’ll usually get pointed out to you, either by the compiler or the person you’re talking to, so you can go back and try again. Eventually, you’ve potentially gotten it right when the compiler stops throwing errors or the person you’re speaking to understands. Unfortunately, in both cases you may still not end up with the desired outcome as your compiler is “stupid” and cannot understand intent, only what you’ve written. Similarly, but different, the human you’re speaking to may bore of your broken language eventually and just move on. There’s no perfect system for everyone, but it never hurts to remember the saying: perfect is the enemy of good enough. It doesn’t matter if your language skills are perfect, just that they’re good enough to convey your meaning effectively for the environment you’re in.
    - tremon 6y ago
      In my experience, when you're an adult, people are too polite/reserved/caring/uncaring to correct spoken language errors for you. They'll be much more likely to infer what you meant silently, and react as if you'd spoken the sentence perfectly. In that sense, people are much more like a web browser in how they process your language than a compiler.
      - foolmeonce 6y ago
        They aren't just polite, it's exhausting to play the pedantic compiler and generally degenerates or requires an agreement with an equivalent exchange. Perhaps having an automatic compiler changes our perception much as an auto-tickling device doesn't work, but surely early levels of math and languages have similar learning paths.
      - oarsinsync 6y ago
        Apologies, I realise the way I wrote this wasn’t clear enough: > Eventually, you’ve potentially gotten it right when ... the person you’re speaking to understands I can see that I wrote poorly here myself, and here you (and child) are correctly correcting me, while simultaneously arguing against that happening, which is kinda ironic! What I failed to adequately express was that human languages are a lot more forgiving of errors, and as long as the message is understood, you’ve gotten it “right”
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  The thing is, computer languages are extremely simple compared to human languages. Even the more arcane ones, like C++, probably have on the order of 1-200 'words' that you ahev to learn to 'speak' them fluently. Of course, you also need to learn large amounts of library functions and their semantics, but that's more like learning who the people at court are and what their roles are than like the language. You could speak perfect French, but you still have to learn that you must call the Comptesse de Barry before calling the King if you don't want her to be upset. Even patterns are often more in this area of cultural/local context rather than the actual langauge - more like learning the difference between overly-descriptive prose and good prose is (which is why the knowledge about it also tends to translate better between different languages).
cmwelsh 6y ago
Makes total sense. If your grammar is wrong, the compiler will catch you. If your English grammar is wrong, I will catch you. Make progress.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  The only time I'm going to correct your grammar if you haven't explicitly asked me to is if there's some ambiguity and you're saying something important for me to know e.g. making a specific request. Otherwise, if I think I get what you're going for, imo you're doing fine. Talking good is mainly useful as a class indicator. One thing I think I've noticed among a lot of people who have lived in English-speaking countries for a very long time is that, after their accent reaches general intelligibility and their grammar reaches a point where they're always quickly understood, they stop progressing and leave it at that. I knew an Iranian-American guy in his 50s who had been in the US since his 20s who would drop every article except when it was important.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    For your compiler, everything not stated explicitly is ambiguous and potentially important. Talking good may not be necessary for every day conversation, where the stakes are typically low, but you'd go out of your way to avoid grammar mistakes in something important like a legal contract or a published article. Presumably if someone were talking you through modifying your computer and a single wrong move would brick it, you'd ask for clarification should they say anything even remotely weird.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>The confident students who aren't concerned with getting all the specifics of grammar exactly perfect are the ones that are making the most progress toward being conversational One of my Danish teachers said that the move towards making people conversational is a fairly recent invention, and approximately a century ago (my memory is spotty on when the change happened) teaching was more geared towards making people literate in the new language.
lordnacho 6y ago
Weirdly I make the same observation as you about second languages and detail in grammar, but I came to the opposite conclusion. I thought natural language and computer language were pretty similar. One issue in the study is what a reasonable comparison is. Our ancestors would have talked about "there is a lion over there" and such mundane things all the time, so we shouldn't be surprised if we're just "nexting" those kinds of things with a specialized circuit. Obviously that doesn't exist for coding, but the question is whether there is natural language that can't be nexted. I'm thinking of James Joyce's Ulysees or Shakespeare type stuff. It's weird even for the native reader. Does that activate the math network? Also, isn't that a better analogy for how you program machines? You're telling the computer what to do in a language that isn't assembler, and doesn't have the same machine model as your coding language, with a heavy dependence on shorthands established only in the context you created (by writing functions, classes, etc). I thought the reason why a lot of people find it hard to read code is because you're inherently doing something awkward, translation. I've been learning a new language as well, with the wrinkle that it's quite closely related to one I already speak. Mandarin is lovely, it makes me wonder why there are languages where the verbs and nouns are changed. It also means you can jump into saying useful things pretty fast, you are just restricted by vocabulary. WRT coding, this is similar. Coding languages tend to have very few things you must know (except C++ lol) to get started, but with a lot of reading libs necessary to do anything in a given domain.
- eru 6y ago
  Shakespear wrote in reasonably normal English. It's just that the language has evolved since.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Ulysses (and even more so Finnegan's wake) is not written in a natural language. It is a constructed artificial language. Many of Shakespeare's works are also written in a constructed language because of their need for rhyme and rhythm, albeit closer to the natural language of his time. I've also noted that rhymed text, even if otherwise using natural syntax, is harder for me to follow as my brain tends to get lulled by the rhyme itself and stops paying attention to the content, it's just trying to predict the pattern. Now that said, the idea of comparing programming languages with natural languages or even constructed languages seems very strange to me. Natural languages are tools for thought, expression and communication. Programming languages are tools for, well, programming. Even the relationship between the grammar of a PL and the grammar of a human language is distant (we often intuitively think of identifiers as similar to nouns and verbs in human languages, but in fact all identifiers are equivalent to proper nouns in human languages, and the actual equivalents of nouns and verbs are stuff like block openers, significant white space, function application, maybe the keywords). It is a well-known fact already that humans can only naturally learn human languages, which have a specific kind of grammar. Even some clumsy attempts at standardizing human language end up introducing un-natural grammar that children can't pick up until later in school when it is drilled into them. It would have been truly surprising to find out that we can use our natural language capacity for something as alien as a PL.
traceroute66 6y ago
> obsessing over grammar is almost detrimental to making progress with a new language If you skip over the hard parts, then you're not exactly learning a language. You might as well just learn from one of those "Hello, my name is Bob, where's the toilet ? " cartoon books. Its a bit like those people who learn programming informally. Most of them end up writing spaghetti code for the rest of their lives. Its the same with languages. Skip the hard bits and your attempt fluency will hit a wall at some point relatively early on. Grammar is tough, but stick at it, it will eventually become second nature. Don't be lazy.
- kichimi 6y ago
  If you master grammar but can't pronounce anything, or your vocabulary is too small, or you have no confidence to speak, or you don't learn the way natives say things through trial and error, then all your efforts are completely wasted. Language isn't just some word for word translations and a new sentence structure, it's much much deeper than that. The only thing that is required to learn a language is tens of thousands of hours of practice.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >If you skip over the hard parts, then you're not exactly learning a language. That's not true. Most native speaks have little knowledge of the grammar and syntax beyond intuitive. They have forgotten most of what they've been taught at school, plus, they could speak quite well before going to school and being taught grammar in the first place. We acquire language by osmosis, not by studying, and even less so by studying the syntax.
  - visarga 6y ago
    Apparently knowing grammar acts as a filter for bad speech, but it doesn't actually generate speech itself. Learning to speak is based on direct experience, not abstract rules.
  - olikas 6y ago
    > Most native speaks have little knowledge of the grammar and syntax beyond intuitive. The fact that they don't know the scientific names of the grammar rules doesn't mean that they don't know grammar. As somebody how's native language is very dissimilar to English, my intuitive language rules are no help speaking English. The grammar you are taught at school is descriptive of English and not a prescription. The distinction s very similar to "laws in physics". Nature doesn't really care about the rules we impose on it. Learning grammar alone is not enough. Learning vocabulary alone is not enough. Immersing yourself to a language without a guide (like your parents guided you into language) is completely ineffective. Grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation are equally important if you want to get fluent in both spoken and written communication in a different language.
dclowd9901 6y ago
I’ve found that reapproaching language when things don’t make sense to be very valuable. Gender in German, for instance. It seems to be completely arbitrary save for one detail: whichever “sounds” best. I compare this to using “a/an” in English (albeit the rules in English are somewhat more “strict” in this regard.)
- mejutoco 6y ago
  There a re a few heuristics for German that are very useful. I had this problem myself and researched it deeply in this article (full disclosure: own website) https://mejuto.co/statistical-grammar-guessing-a-german-nouns-gender/ https://mejuto.co/statistical-grammar-guessing-a-german-noun...
usrusr 6y ago
Yes, it seems like spoken languages can have a rather pronounced Ballmer Peak when you are learning them and are not very good at it. And the peak is much further out than with programming languages.
MrFantastic 6y ago
3 years of HS spanish with a grammar nazi teacher. He's interupt mid-sentance to correct your verb tense. His students were objectively less skilled than the other spanish teacher that focused on vocabulary and conversational skills.
beowulfey 6y ago
That attitude is actually how I program—with scripted languages I write code and see what happens, if it didn’t work I write it again. I’m relearning C++ now and am doing it a similar way (albeit I have to be a little more careful because compilation makes it a lot slower). At one point, I wondered if this same strategy would make for a good (human) language learning app. Kind of like you described... rather than something like Duolingo where you have to memorize answers, it might help to have a conversational app where you see the results of your attempts in real time.
- jooize 6y ago
  SingStar for language?
- Kaveren 6y ago
  > That attitude is actually how I program—with scripted languages I write code and see what happens, if it didn’t work I write it again. This is an incredibly harmful attitude towards learning, but it feels nice because it's a lot less effort than actually trying to read or listen to something to learn. It's just laziness. Learning C++ this way is how someone would end up with a buffer overflow every 30 lines of code they write. It's the reason some self-taught developers can't give you the fuzziest definition of the difference between O(n) and O(n^2). The closest approximation of this is how kids learn to speak, but this is incredibly inefficient, and they receive many years of formal education anyway.
  - beowulfey 6y ago
    It isn't only guesswork -- there is a lot of reading and researching involved too. I figured that was obvious but perhaps it was not. The point is that it is learning by doing rather than rote memorization and recall. It is easier for me to do something, see the result, and figure out what went wrong if it didn't work. It allows me to understand the function behind something, versus just being told "this is how to do something and you should always do it this way" without an explanation as to why. What works for you isn't what works for everybody. And I'm absolutely not denying the importance of learning theory.
ajuc 6y ago
> Which is obviously the complete opposite of using a programming language. I think learning programming by learning all the rules upfront and then trying to do sth isn't the best way to do it. Much easier to try to do something and iterate quickly learning what's needed to do the job. That's how people learnt programming on 8-bit computers - type a sample program and change stuff to see what it does. Then find something you want to achieve and try to change the sample program to do that. Eventually you understand how basics work and can learn everything else.

colmvp 6y ago

Interesting. I feel like coding is not that dissimilar. In the early phases of learning a new coding language, I learn how to write lines of code. Sometimes it compiles, most of the time it would cause errors. At some point it works, but a more seasoned engineer could easily find places to refactor it in order to make it more extensible/flexible, easier to read, less brittle, and most importantly to this discussion on coding language, more idiomatic. Now, you could say surely I could've seen these by reading the docs and learning about certain library features or patterns specific to the language. But in my experience, I tend to learn faster by first exercising my brain and trying it out on my own take before having someone (be it a mentor or a tutorial/book) correct me so that I have a bit more context about why an alternative approach is better.

godelski 6y ago
I don't understand this. If your code has wrong syntax it doesn't compile. If wrong grammar you can get very wrong results. But in english you can say "I go store" and it's understandable (which btw, can be a direct translation from several languages)
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  > If your code has wrong syntax it doesn't compile. If wrong grammar you can get very wrong results. In both cases, when you get it that wrong that your meaning doesn’t come across correctly, it’ll usually get pointed out to you, either by the compiler or the person you’re talking to, so you can go back and try again. Eventually, you’ve potentially gotten it right when the compiler stops throwing errors or the person you’re speaking to understands. Unfortunately, in both cases you may still not end up with the desired outcome as your compiler is “stupid” and cannot understand intent, only what you’ve written. Similarly, but different, the human you’re speaking to may bore of your broken language eventually and just move on. There’s no perfect system for everyone, but it never hurts to remember the saying: perfect is the enemy of good enough. It doesn’t matter if your language skills are perfect, just that they’re good enough to convey your meaning effectively for the environment you’re in.
  - tremon 6y ago
    In my experience, when you're an adult, people are too polite/reserved/caring/uncaring to correct spoken language errors for you. They'll be much more likely to infer what you meant silently, and react as if you'd spoken the sentence perfectly. In that sense, people are much more like a web browser in how they process your language than a compiler.
    - foolmeonce 6y ago
      They aren't just polite, it's exhausting to play the pedantic compiler and generally degenerates or requires an agreement with an equivalent exchange. Perhaps having an automatic compiler changes our perception much as an auto-tickling device doesn't work, but surely early levels of math and languages have similar learning paths.
    - oarsinsync 6y ago
      Apologies, I realise the way I wrote this wasn’t clear enough: > Eventually, you’ve potentially gotten it right when ... the person you’re speaking to understands I can see that I wrote poorly here myself, and here you (and child) are correctly correcting me, while simultaneously arguing against that happening, which is kinda ironic! What I failed to adequately express was that human languages are a lot more forgiving of errors, and as long as the message is understood, you’ve gotten it “right”
tsimionescu 6y ago
The thing is, computer languages are extremely simple compared to human languages. Even the more arcane ones, like C++, probably have on the order of 1-200 'words' that you ahev to learn to 'speak' them fluently. Of course, you also need to learn large amounts of library functions and their semantics, but that's more like learning who the people at court are and what their roles are than like the language. You could speak perfect French, but you still have to learn that you must call the Comptesse de Barry before calling the King if you don't want her to be upset. Even patterns are often more in this area of cultural/local context rather than the actual langauge - more like learning the difference between overly-descriptive prose and good prose is (which is why the knowledge about it also tends to translate better between different languages).

cmwelsh 6y ago

Makes total sense. If your grammar is wrong, the compiler will catch you. If your English grammar is wrong, I will catch you. Make progress.

pessimizer 6y ago
The only time I'm going to correct your grammar if you haven't explicitly asked me to is if there's some ambiguity and you're saying something important for me to know e.g. making a specific request. Otherwise, if I think I get what you're going for, imo you're doing fine. Talking good is mainly useful as a class indicator. One thing I think I've noticed among a lot of people who have lived in English-speaking countries for a very long time is that, after their accent reaches general intelligibility and their grammar reaches a point where they're always quickly understood, they stop progressing and leave it at that. I knew an Iranian-American guy in his 50s who had been in the US since his 20s who would drop every article except when it was important.
- jjk166 6y ago
  For your compiler, everything not stated explicitly is ambiguous and potentially important. Talking good may not be necessary for every day conversation, where the stakes are typically low, but you'd go out of your way to avoid grammar mistakes in something important like a legal contract or a published article. Presumably if someone were talking you through modifying your computer and a single wrong move would brick it, you'd ask for clarification should they say anything even remotely weird.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

>The confident students who aren't concerned with getting all the specifics of grammar exactly perfect are the ones that are making the most progress toward being conversational One of my Danish teachers said that the move towards making people conversational is a fairly recent invention, and approximately a century ago (my memory is spotty on when the change happened) teaching was more geared towards making people literate in the new language.

lordnacho 6y ago

Weirdly I make the same observation as you about second languages and detail in grammar, but I came to the opposite conclusion. I thought natural language and computer language were pretty similar. One issue in the study is what a reasonable comparison is. Our ancestors would have talked about "there is a lion over there" and such mundane things all the time, so we shouldn't be surprised if we're just "nexting" those kinds of things with a specialized circuit. Obviously that doesn't exist for coding, but the question is whether there is natural language that can't be nexted. I'm thinking of James Joyce's Ulysees or Shakespeare type stuff. It's weird even for the native reader. Does that activate the math network? Also, isn't that a better analogy for how you program machines? You're telling the computer what to do in a language that isn't assembler, and doesn't have the same machine model as your coding language, with a heavy dependence on shorthands established only in the context you created (by writing functions, classes, etc). I thought the reason why a lot of people find it hard to read code is because you're inherently doing something awkward, translation. I've been learning a new language as well, with the wrinkle that it's quite closely related to one I already speak. Mandarin is lovely, it makes me wonder why there are languages where the verbs and nouns are changed. It also means you can jump into saying useful things pretty fast, you are just restricted by vocabulary. WRT coding, this is similar. Coding languages tend to have very few things you must know (except C++ lol) to get started, but with a lot of reading libs necessary to do anything in a given domain.

eru 6y ago
Shakespear wrote in reasonably normal English. It's just that the language has evolved since.
tsimionescu 6y ago
Ulysses (and even more so Finnegan's wake) is not written in a natural language. It is a constructed artificial language. Many of Shakespeare's works are also written in a constructed language because of their need for rhyme and rhythm, albeit closer to the natural language of his time. I've also noted that rhymed text, even if otherwise using natural syntax, is harder for me to follow as my brain tends to get lulled by the rhyme itself and stops paying attention to the content, it's just trying to predict the pattern. Now that said, the idea of comparing programming languages with natural languages or even constructed languages seems very strange to me. Natural languages are tools for thought, expression and communication. Programming languages are tools for, well, programming. Even the relationship between the grammar of a PL and the grammar of a human language is distant (we often intuitively think of identifiers as similar to nouns and verbs in human languages, but in fact all identifiers are equivalent to proper nouns in human languages, and the actual equivalents of nouns and verbs are stuff like block openers, significant white space, function application, maybe the keywords). It is a well-known fact already that humans can only naturally learn human languages, which have a specific kind of grammar. Even some clumsy attempts at standardizing human language end up introducing un-natural grammar that children can't pick up until later in school when it is drilled into them. It would have been truly surprising to find out that we can use our natural language capacity for something as alien as a PL.

traceroute66 6y ago

> obsessing over grammar is almost detrimental to making progress with a new language If you skip over the hard parts, then you're not exactly learning a language. You might as well just learn from one of those "Hello, my name is Bob, where's the toilet ? " cartoon books. Its a bit like those people who learn programming informally. Most of them end up writing spaghetti code for the rest of their lives. Its the same with languages. Skip the hard bits and your attempt fluency will hit a wall at some point relatively early on. Grammar is tough, but stick at it, it will eventually become second nature. Don't be lazy.

kichimi 6y ago
If you master grammar but can't pronounce anything, or your vocabulary is too small, or you have no confidence to speak, or you don't learn the way natives say things through trial and error, then all your efforts are completely wasted. Language isn't just some word for word translations and a new sentence structure, it's much much deeper than that. The only thing that is required to learn a language is tens of thousands of hours of practice.
coldtea 6y ago
>If you skip over the hard parts, then you're not exactly learning a language. That's not true. Most native speaks have little knowledge of the grammar and syntax beyond intuitive. They have forgotten most of what they've been taught at school, plus, they could speak quite well before going to school and being taught grammar in the first place. We acquire language by osmosis, not by studying, and even less so by studying the syntax.
- visarga 6y ago
  Apparently knowing grammar acts as a filter for bad speech, but it doesn't actually generate speech itself. Learning to speak is based on direct experience, not abstract rules.
- olikas 6y ago
  > Most native speaks have little knowledge of the grammar and syntax beyond intuitive. The fact that they don't know the scientific names of the grammar rules doesn't mean that they don't know grammar. As somebody how's native language is very dissimilar to English, my intuitive language rules are no help speaking English. The grammar you are taught at school is descriptive of English and not a prescription. The distinction s very similar to "laws in physics". Nature doesn't really care about the rules we impose on it. Learning grammar alone is not enough. Learning vocabulary alone is not enough. Immersing yourself to a language without a guide (like your parents guided you into language) is completely ineffective. Grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation are equally important if you want to get fluent in both spoken and written communication in a different language.

dclowd9901 6y ago

I’ve found that reapproaching language when things don’t make sense to be very valuable. Gender in German, for instance. It seems to be completely arbitrary save for one detail: whichever “sounds” best. I compare this to using “a/an” in English (albeit the rules in English are somewhat more “strict” in this regard.)

mejutoco 6y ago
There a re a few heuristics for German that are very useful. I had this problem myself and researched it deeply in this article (full disclosure: own website) https://mejuto.co/statistical-grammar-guessing-a-german-nouns-gender/ https://mejuto.co/statistical-grammar-guessing-a-german-noun...

usrusr 6y ago

Yes, it seems like spoken languages can have a rather pronounced Ballmer Peak when you are learning them and are not very good at it. And the peak is much further out than with programming languages.

MrFantastic 6y ago

3 years of HS spanish with a grammar nazi teacher. He's interupt mid-sentance to correct your verb tense. His students were objectively less skilled than the other spanish teacher that focused on vocabulary and conversational skills.

beowulfey 6y ago

That attitude is actually how I program—with scripted languages I write code and see what happens, if it didn’t work I write it again. I’m relearning C++ now and am doing it a similar way (albeit I have to be a little more careful because compilation makes it a lot slower). At one point, I wondered if this same strategy would make for a good (human) language learning app. Kind of like you described... rather than something like Duolingo where you have to memorize answers, it might help to have a conversational app where you see the results of your attempts in real time.

jooize 6y ago
SingStar for language?
Kaveren 6y ago
> That attitude is actually how I program—with scripted languages I write code and see what happens, if it didn’t work I write it again. This is an incredibly harmful attitude towards learning, but it feels nice because it's a lot less effort than actually trying to read or listen to something to learn. It's just laziness. Learning C++ this way is how someone would end up with a buffer overflow every 30 lines of code they write. It's the reason some self-taught developers can't give you the fuzziest definition of the difference between O(n) and O(n^2). The closest approximation of this is how kids learn to speak, but this is incredibly inefficient, and they receive many years of formal education anyway.
- beowulfey 6y ago
  It isn't only guesswork -- there is a lot of reading and researching involved too. I figured that was obvious but perhaps it was not. The point is that it is learning by doing rather than rote memorization and recall. It is easier for me to do something, see the result, and figure out what went wrong if it didn't work. It allows me to understand the function behind something, versus just being told "this is how to do something and you should always do it this way" without an explanation as to why. What works for you isn't what works for everybody. And I'm absolutely not denying the importance of learning theory.

ajuc 6y ago

> Which is obviously the complete opposite of using a programming language. I think learning programming by learning all the rules upfront and then trying to do sth isn't the best way to do it. Much easier to try to do something and iterate quickly learning what's needed to do the job. That's how people learnt programming on 8-bit computers - type a sample program and change stuff to see what it does. Then find something you want to achieve and try to change the sample program to do that. Eventually you understand how basics work and can learn everything else.