The speed of learning a new skill is very individual thing. If you think that you should learn quicker than you do, you might think that you’re not smart enough or not capable enough. I don’t think that’s the case at all.
In other words you have certain expectations about how much time do you need to learn something. How do you know how long should it take? As with most things, we ask others for clues.
And that’s the first problem. We set our expectations based on someone else’s experience. Which can be totally off the charts.
Mainly because most of us doesn’t really want to admin how long did it really take to learn something hard. We want to look smart in the eyes of others, so we tend to shorten the learning time lines in our stories.
Plus programming is really broad subject and different people can understand different things by “learning programming”
So, what’s better measurement of success in learning programming?
A far better way to measure your success is to measure it by completion of a small and interesting project. Especially at the beginning forget about speed.
Set aside a regular, fixed amount of time to work on your project.
Remove the time pressure if you can. If you learn something complex like programming time pressure is a killer. It will slow you way way down.
And the surprising thing is, that you will move much quicker that you might except. You will be more focused. You will “get it” quicker.
To move at full speed you need to remove everything from your environment that distracts you including focusing on how fast are you doing.
Focus on progress instead and speed will take care of itself.