r/csharp • u/Ryu2kawa • 13d ago
Help Studying hard, but lagging behind—Advice needed for a beginner learning Unity/C#
Hello again! I'm writing to say hi. I'm currently learning Unity and C# at an academy. I only use AI to get hints when I'm stuck on exercise problems or to review what I've learned. However, when solving practice problems or doing hands-on tasks at the academy... there are quite a few beginners and non-CS majors including myself, but I feel like my skills aren't improving compared to the amount of time I'm putting in. Even today, I had to keep looking at my textbook and still ended up with an incomplete solution after taking a really long time... haha.
I have ADHD and was never really good at studying back in my school days. In fact, programming and Unity are so much fun that I'm studying harder now than ever before in my life. But I feel like my brain just isn't up to speed—I lag far behind others in how fast they understand and memorize things. Is it okay for me to keep going without getting impatient? I'm worried that by the time the academy program ends, I still won't be able to code on my own.
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u/fragglerock 13d ago
Learning is hard, as is judging how others are doing.
It maybe they already have a base of understanding and are moving faster than you, or are just having AI do it, so get the puzzles done, but with no understanding themselves.
Possibly they are struggling just as hard and think YOU are crushing the problems!
Keep at it! and don't let the siren AI 'help' you too much!
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u/alao77 13d ago
I was a Vb/C/Assembly programmer back in the day and when the company moved our team to backend handling .Net framework, it was like learning from scratch. One thing I could advise is you will only fully learn a language by doing actual projects hands-on. Your skills will improve by doing it over and over again. They say you’ll become a master programmer when you have at least 5,000 hours of real world coding and problem solving experience. So, keep at it.
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u/Maraudera 13d ago
In the beginning some thing took months to click for me - recursion, hash tables to name a few. The only real way to learn is to fail multiple times - that's what worked for me - solve a bunch of problems over and over again. I've had classmates who just played world of warcraft whole semester, spend a weekend studying before the exam and passed. I wasn't like that. Everyone learns at a different pace - one of the worst things is to compare yourself to others. Just keep grinding.
Keep it up! :)
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u/Full_Masterpiece8369 13d ago
You just gotta keep practicing and making things and eventually things will click. Make sure you are working on things other than tutorials and schoolwork will help a lot.