See title. I’ve been to quite a few local language meetups and saw lots of people IRL who are learning languages: wondering how are y’all doing too
For myself… learning French due to necessity. I am making progress, just veeery slow. I underestimated how difficult it would be (a lot of vocabs between English/French are similar… but the languages themselves are not!)
Does Python count? If so, it’s going okay.
I keep bouncing around on the sources for where I’m studying from. I started with w3schools, but didn’t like it. I went to https://programming-24.mooc.fi/ and I like it. I’m currently also watching these videos being used for prep on a certification, but they’re not great - the slides sometimes will have errors (print statement without closing parantheses for example) and sometimes the instructor will read one thing but the slide says something else (instructor says “max” but slide says “min” - luckily this time it was just the names of variables rather than actual functions or something). They also don’t go in depth on a lot of methods, and there’s no good exercises or anything. But at least it’ll get me a cert if I pass the tests, which is paid for by my work.
My shameful secret is admitting that LLMs are great for things like getting comfortable with a programming language. They’re generally trained on the same publicly available samples as these courses and the conversational extrapolation is great for identifying concepts you forgot the technical terms for (ie. “How would I do this in python: [Java code]”)
Vibe coding sucks, but walking through some examples with an LLM and a REPL can save hours of navigating docs or Hello World blog posts.
I"m pretty sure that the voice of the instructor is AI, it bugs me so much lol. I’ve been trying to avoid AI as much as possible, so if I’m really struggling to find more info on what I’m looking for, I’ll resort to it maybe.