Learning Psychology & Opinions: Learning a New Language

Locky's English Playground app in progress of making
Image from Locky's English Playground

The progress of writing Locky's English Playground Android app has been slow. There were a lot of troubles with the software and even with getting the Android examples to run. It took me almost two weeks searching and asking others how to get the examples to work. It was frustrating indeed, very much......

At times I thought, I just wanted to get the end result, just get someone to do it for me so that I do not have to do it myself, but had that really happened, there would have been no fun or satisfaction, no sense of accomplishment and the worst of all, no knowledge learnt.

So I continued to struggle with the codes -- literally struggling. However, I insist on reading up APIs and examples on my Note 2, watching YouTube tutorials, following some of them to code, trying hard to understand how the syntax (the grammar in computer science) works, etc. Not giving up a single bit.

The more I spend time on the Android / Java language, the more it comes to me. I can almost see me succeeding in getting my first program to actually run, and then... Force Close!!!

The program crashed even before it showed anything.

Painstaking hard work never guarantees success, it guarantees your improvement. If you do things with heart, you will succeed one day. A day not know when, but that day will arrive eventually. The key is not to lose hope and motivation.

Learning a programming language is very much the same as learning English, or any other languages. There are limitless objects (new words), syntax (grammar), hierarchy (sentence structures) and methods (idioms).

And there is always that one thing I hate the most -- debugging (error-checking). Tonnes of it! Like Chanel °5, it is inevitable. I must face it with courage if I want to master the language. No pain, no gain!

Ying Wa Girls' School is Tsang Tsz-kwan 

Take for example, Ying Wa Girls' School's top student Tsang Tsz-kwan, a girl with vision and hearing impairment as well as loss of sensitivity in her fingers. Despite her tragic disability, she did not give up herself and resorted to using her lips to read braille, spending at least twice as much time and effort as a normal person does to learn. How cool is that?

The Chinese has an excellent saying, "Take a look at others and then look at yourself", which carries a hidden meaning of "Observe others who are less fortunate than yourself and yet succeeded". If Tsz-kwan can obtain top grades, who with a healthy body still think they should complain about the difficulties in learning?

"Practice makes perfect" is such a cliché, but it's a fact. Wanna be better at something? Gotta work hard for it.


Vocabulary:

Braille
Image from Wikipedia

braille -- (n)[U] /ˈbreɪl/[a] is a tactile writing system used by the blind and the visually impaired that is used for books, menus, signs, elevator buttons, and currency.


Resources:
Braille @ Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille

Super stars @ The Standard
http://thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?we_cat=11&art_id=135574&sid=39958181&con_type=3&d_str=20130716&fc=2