Introduction

Welcome! I’m so glad you stopped by.

This book doesn’t look much like other technical tutorials, does it? Well, for once, looks aren’t deceiving, because Fluent Learning books aren’t much like other technical tutorials. We don’t want to teach you things. We want to help you learn things. We’ve done a lot of research into how people learn, and it turns out that talk, talk, talking at you (like most books do) isn’t wrong, exactly, but it makes learning harder than it needs to be.

Did you learn to speak your native language by reading a book? Of course not; that’s not how people learn. You heard people speaking, tried it for yourself, and then corrected yourself when other people pointed out your mistakes. Sure, you studied grammar and learned new words in school, but the basics (“More milk, Mommy”) you learned by yourself. Now, barring accident and illness (or one-too-many mojitos), you’re not likely to forget it, are you? And you don’t have to think about the mechanics of speech, just what you want to say.

That’s really how we learn everything. We gather some initial information, practice, correct our mistakes, and then add to our basic knowledge. That’s not what happens in most tutorials, but that’s how Fluent Learning works. I’ll give you enough information to get started, give you some exercises to figure out how to do something, and then elaborate on what you’ve learned. Simple, natural, and if you do the work, you will learn. Soon you’ll be able to concentrate on what you want to do, not how to do it, just like when you learned to speak. (But it won’t take as long as learning to speak well.)