First: Have something you want to say

Not just anything. Something important.

Back in the early 90’s I was a supervisor for a janitorial company. I had a crew of six people who didn’t speak one word of english. The president of the company’s son was fluent in Spanish so he gave me about ten phrases to help me manage some sort of communication. Here are the phrases I remember learning.

Clean this table please
Clean this bathroom please
Use the vacuum over there
Pick up the trash over there
This is not finished
Break time
Glass cleaner
Take the trash outside
Where were you

I was able to get by with these phrases and successfully supervise our crew. They were great people to work with and were patient with me but I wanted to learn the language better because I wanted to communicate more.

Looking back there were a lot of good reasons why I learned how to speak spanish conversationally in six months. So in effect I had the motivation. I also had native speakers to practice with on a daily basis. But I believe my success can all be boiled down to one idea; I had something important that I wanted to say to another human being that didn’t speak the same language as me. I had a desire.

Ever since I taught myself how to play guitar at the age of 16 I have been obsessed with how the brain can learn some things effortlessly but struggle to learn something else. Why can’t I just apply the same principles of guitar to learning higher level math? I believe you can.

Learning is a gift we as humans all share equally. It’s a part of our survival. We are designed to learn things fast. What I learned about learning spanish was the incredible desire I had to want to communicate with someone enabled my brain to speak the language quickly and fluently. Even though I didn’t and still don’t know many words I speak the language fast and fluidly.

Desire Brings Focus

Let us imagine for a moment that you are trapped in a foreign country and you have to use the bathroom bad. I mean really bad. So bad you can taste it. You ask people around you where the nearest bathroom is but none understand what you are saying. You have a very strong desire to communicate with someone that you have to relieve yourself. Imagine how focused on this goal you would be. Nothing else in the world would matter. If I told you how to ask where the nearest bathroom was (“Tengo que ir al baño”) in the native language your brain would be primed to remember that term. Especially if you believed you would need to use it again. And the chance of you remembering it long term is very high to avoid this painful situation.

I took this idea and learned Perl as my first programming language.

Many people have said that Perl is hard to learn. And to learn it as your first programming language would make anyone quite. But I had ignorance on my side. Not knowing how hard something is and expecting it to be hard but learning it anyway is a great way to learn in my opinion.

Learning a programming language is much simpler than learning a spoken language because the syntax is very specific and you don’t have to deal with ambiguity as much. There are defined rules that need to be followed. But I took the lessons of learning spanish and applied them to learning a programming language. To learn a language you first have to have something you want to say. To learn a programming language you have to have some problem you want to solve. This desire will pull you through the learning process and change you forever.

To be able to ‘THINK’ in Perl I had to understand my desires and then map those desires to solutions in the language. Much the same way I would map my desires to communicate with another person in their language. This process creates fluency. Shortcuts of ideas to solutions.

So start with your why, your desire, and harness them. Learning is inevitable.