Week 1 of 6: Wait, this looks familiar
Last time I did any coding, I was 13. Even then, I was rubbish and used magazines for help. 40 years later, I didn't even get that far.
Did you learn another language as a kid?
Well, I say learn, but did you do it at school?
For me it was French. I even carried on until I was 16. This week in my 6-week coding adventure has been a bit like my adult experience of this dormant linguistic knowledge that exists deep within me.
You know how it is: a TV show comes on, and the dialogue is in French. You understand a whole sentence. It’s usually a basic greeting. Like, really basic. You get excited because YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT GOING ON.
You lean in, thinking, I’m multi-lingual, I’m going to follow this conversation.
Thirty seconds later, it’s dawns on you that maybe you can pick out one word in ten, and that you kind of get the gist of what may be going on, but please don’t let anyone ask you what people are saying because you’d be pretty fuzzy with your answer.
Another 30 seconds later and anything you are understanding is now body language. Tenses, vocabulary, grammatical norms and oddities all fly over your head. It’s not even close - the dialogue has ascended to 30,000 feet and you realise that your linguistic skills are actually sea-level (despite me getting a B at O-level).
That’s what it’s been like this first week in my adventures in coding.
Sick kids and the resultant lack of sleep didn't help. Couple this with me directing my energy for rare bits of paid work over the past few days, and I didn't get to bolster by dormant 13-year old understanding of coding much at all.
I’m still at sea-level. I’m hoping to improve my grammar this week.
It’s in there somewhere.
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