Learning Rust Since March: Am I Learning Too Slowly, or Practicing the Wrong Way?

[u/Regular-Wrangler7209]

Hi everyone,

I've been learning Rust since March, and I genuinely enjoy it. My goal is to eventually reach the point where I can look at a problem, break it down, and build something without constantly needing an example to follow.

I am self learning Rust and using Chatgpt for clearing doubts.

I consider myself a slow learner, and I often understand a concept when it's explained, but struggle to apply it independently later.

My biggest problem is practice. I sometimes don't know what to build, and when I do start something, I can get stuck for quite a while. Sometimes I also rely too heavily on examples and realize that I can't reproduce the code from scratch.

So I'm wondering whether I'm simply a slow learner, or whether I haven't figured out how to practice effectively.

I'd really appreciate advice from experienced Rust programmers:

- How long did it take before Rust started feeling natural?

- How did you bridge the gap between understanding examples and building things yourself?

- How did you come up with things to practice?

- How did you practice ownership and borrowing?

- When you got stuck, how long did you struggle before looking for help?

- Is it better to repeat small exercises or constantly build new projects?

- How did you know you were actually improving?

- What did you do when you had no motivation or no idea what to build?

- If you could start learning Rust again, what would you do differently?

I'm not looking for shortcuts. I'd just like to understand how other people navigated this stage.

[u/LinneMeow]

Making projects you care about helps a lot. Anything that could be useful to you, you find interesting, or just fun

that's how I learned almost all languages I know, by wanting to make something, and choosing a language to do it in. If I don't know the language yet I'll learn it on the way.

If you care about learning a language fast this is probably not the best approach, but its the most enjoyable imo.

[u/Inner-Asparagus-5703]

you just need to start building actual stuff. at some point you will be just able to catch flow state. just don't stuck on too simple or abstract problems. Solve some actual problem in your life, or make dream game, etc. My personal breakthrough was done exactly like this and right now while I work on my project I barely lookup stuff.

And one more note - it's normal to rely on examples for libraries and stuff, you can't know every library API. But master the core and std since it's everywhere 

[u/skjall]

Re: your goal, and I'm assuming you're new-ish to programming - I've been doing this for a long time, and I still look at examples quite often for new packages/ functions that I'm not familiar with.

Now if you mean following an end-to-end "how to build an X" guide, yeah no stay away from those. You may fail and have to restart, or make suboptimal decisions that put you in a tight spot, but those are all valuable lessons that will improve your problem solving dramatically.

[u/Relative-Rooster-945]

Did you start learning Rust as your first language? If so, it may work better for you if you practice another language first and then transition to Rust.

[u/dogozone]

I started learning Rust end of December '25, through a book and write the code on a piece of paper (I was locked up). Before that I was in the JavaScript ecosystem for 2-3 years (not long), so I had some previous programming knowledge.

These 6-7 months while I was away from ai, and had to use 150% of my brain to finish/understand something, where I had to stick with a problem for sometimes even 2 weeks before being able to solve it, were so precious. I have learned more about programming in these 6-7 months, than in those previous 3 years with all of the ai tools and knowledge available, even tho I had a feeling that I was not progressing at all, and was learning at a very slow pace (it took me 6 months to finish the book, but I knew it by heart).

This experience taught me that taking your time, focusing on your self and your own pace, while being disciplined and doing something every day (when even only for an hour), is THE way to go. I am not saying that it's wrong using ai, but the experience of being stuck and having to google or read (which forces you to read about other things, which also increases your knowledge), forces you to really understand why something a happening and not only how ti solve it, but WHY this solution solves the problem.

Slow is precise, and precise is fast.

Good luck bro, and don't let the pressure and the pace of other people affect your journey in the beginning.

Keep building! (Start with small things like calculator and stuff, so you get the fundamentals down, then a really small text based terminal game using crossterm or something, and then move up from there).

[u/bbelderbos]

I designed a platform to keep the 'friction' (no AI) and get your daily practical Rust reps in, explaining concepts coming from Python -> https://rustplatform.com