Are there some things that you cannot learn?

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I don't mean things like how to be a morning person, or to change your life, or think like a rich person, or any other such bollocks. I mean skills that should be learnable, things that have a right way and a wrong way, like, for example, Blender.

I'm WFH now, so I have more spare time in the evening. I decided it would be fun to learn how to make animations - nothing serious, just funny little animated people doing silly things.

After two hours of trying to turn blobs into something that vaguely resembled a human, I realised you can download free people-shaped blobs. Three hours into trying to get my people-shaped blob to move like a person, I realised you can download special control rigs. Another hour later, my people-shaped blob was no longer people-shaped. Poor Blob was a distorted smudge across the screen.

It then occurred to me that Blender was not going to be one of the things I could learn while doing and by reading online tutorials, and I should probably start from the basics.

I've spent two and a half hours tonight trying to flatten a cube. In spite of spending two and a half hours on this, I am only 20 minutes into the course because I have to keep going back. The lady from the video course is making me feel stabby, and it is no longer fun; it is the opposite of fun, but I will not be beaten by a software that a primary-aged child could master.

Is it me? Is it Blender? Are there just some things that some people will never be able to master no matter how determined they are?

Really fascinating to read this as my teenage DD who couldn’t cope at all in MS secondary school subsequently diagnosed as AuDHD has taught herself Blender plus learnt crochet, and Korean using YouTube & Netflix without subtitles and plays the piano. Maybe it’s a part of the brain needed that is accessed differently. Yet she struggles with many things that most folk find easy. She does rotate through a lot of YouTubers finding a learning style that suits her, and has herself a couple of channels on very niche interests which attract good feedback as she can communicate complex things with ease yet is seriously struggling to pass her gcse English. HOW we all learn is different and finding that way is key to learning new skills.

Yep. I will never be able to draw, or paint, or any other visual art.

I was always spectacularly crap at art in school, and a few years ago I realised I was aphantasic and that pretty much explained why.

I can compose a piece of music. I hear it in my head, and then can play that on the piano, and then write down the notes I've played.

I cannot see the thing I want to draw in my head. If I want to draw a rabbit, then obviously I know what a rabbit looks like. If I went out and saw a rabbit, my brain would go "That's a rabbit", so the knowledge is definitely in there, but I just can't picture it in my head to then copy that mental image onto the paper. It's no better if I've got a reference picture, because I have to look away from it to look at the paper and my pencil, and so the image is instantly gone from my brain.

Calculus. Peeps have tried to teach me three times. Might have another go in my declining years. Wish me luck.

Driving, I've had hundreds of lessons, I can technically drive a car, I cannot pass the test, my brain goes blank, I can't focus for that long. My friends and colleagues make fun of me often about it. 😣😭.

I appreciate your confidence in my ability to Blender. You're wrong, but I appreciate it. It's not a free course; it's on Udemy's subscription service, and it was the highest-rated course on there, so I don't think it's the course. It's definitely me.

I'm relieved to see it's not just me and others struggled with Blender. And it's interesting to see so many people cannot crochet. That's another skill I never mastered. I can knit, but crochet defeated me. That didn't bother me as much as not being able to master Blender.

You can though. You are capable. Blender is just a piece of software and most people who have a basic intelligence, which you clearly do because you can string together a grammatically correct sentence, can learn it.

If you had a good enough teacher who supported you in the right way and answered all your questions then you would learn.

You are trying to learn it by yourself on video tutorials which may or may not make sense to you and your way of learning.

It's not the thing you are trying to learn, it's the way in which you are trying to learn it.

Same with crochet.

If you were locked in a room for a week with someone who can crochet and nothing but a set of crochet hooks and yarn - assuming they were a reasonable teacher and you wanted to learn rather than start into space - you'd finish that week able to crochet.

Funny all the comments about crochet. I crochet. I watch YouTube for new stitches but some projects require so many hours of work I go back to my old standbys (I make wearables). Reading patterns I can manage too but I’m better with a video.
Math - that’s my bugbear. I can do GCSE type stuff no issue but I had to proofread a Y2 university math paper for an academic journal and I understood about four words, ‘and’, ‘the’ being two of them!
Bridge. I can just about play but I do not naturally ‘get it’ - so many rules!

Ride a bike and swim. People don’t believe me until they try to teach me and then they back away slowly…

Thanks for this thread! It reminded me to buy some sock yarn to start knitting now the nights are getting a little shorter. 😁

Ski
Bake
Read music
Get rid of fucking weeds

Anything beyond the basics in languages. I made a serious effort to learn better French and Latin. Still rubbish at both.

Maths.
I tried and tried, I can understand complex maths like algebra quite easily. Triangles were a breeze.

Times tables? Division? Fractions! Decimals?
Nope.

I understand it for all of 5 minutes, as soon as I think about something else poof it's gone again.

I have to visualise numbers and mentally work things out like I would on a piece of paper just to do simple addition.

English? A breeze.

Science Things.

Ds2 amazes me every day with his Science Brain- he took 4 A levels, all sciency/maths orientated. He says it's all obvious to him, and is as natural as breathing.

I, however, can actually feel my brain sticking its fingers in its ears and shouting 'LA LA LA' when I ask him to explain something to me in terms that a 3 year old could understand.

Crafts, however... I haven't met a craft yet that I can't do (including crochet, which is one of my favourite ways to relax.)

In maths - probability and the binary system.

Reversing out of a parking space although I'm very good at reversing into ine which a lot of people can't do.

Another one for Instagram. Cannot understand how it works at all
And also crochet. Insanely complicated to me and I can knit all sorts of things. It is a lot more logical.

Swimming. I just can't. Have had so many lessons and so many people try to teach me but I sink.

I also cannot learn to speak or understand French (I scraped a C in my GCSE as I can do a passable job of reading it, and probably could write it at the time).
I also can’t sing in tune or pick out different things in music. My music teacher at school despaired as I was good at other subjects, and did understand the theory fine, I just could not hear differences in tone or whatever unless they were really extreme.
i’ve come to realise my auditory processing is just shit ( I am autistic) and I do much better following stuff written down.

Greek is a very difficult language TBF 😅 You have letters that look and sound the same as English, letters that look the same but sound different and then a whole load of others that are like WTF 😵

And Cypriot Greek isn't the same as Greek Greek, that's a whole other challenge 😂 🇨🇾🇬🇷

I sing in tune, learn languages easily and can learn all sports. But I can't learn how to get "tidy" and tidy up. I just look around and don't know what to do. Hoovering, cleaning, cooking fine but the tidying up bit knowing where to put things is just out of my league. And also making grocery list! I just can not get my head around looking around knowing what we need. Luckily dh does this.

Learning dance sequences and even some steps. For example the time step in tap dancing. I remember shuffle hop step, shuffle hop step & then my mind just goes blank. Even if we do the same routine week after week in a Zumba class; I’m always slavishly following the teacher rather than learning & remembering it.

Another who cant swim despite many lessons, i just sink!

I’m so bad at even simple dance choreography. I would love to learn how to Charleston etc.

The most important thing is that you are all giving it a go.... whatever it is. Trying and failing is better than not trying at all.

I'm hopeless at remembering dance steps too. I tried tap dancing - useless and that goes for any other type.
However I've no problem with Scottish dances as we learn those in primary school and do them at weddings. They make sense to me as everything is in sections of 4 bars.

Strategically hitting a ball with some kind of bat. I can always remember PE teachers saying to look for gaps in the fielders and aim there. Are you joking? I’m just concentrating on trying to connect the bat with the ball; I’ve got no way of controlling where it goes!