Why is learning a new skill harder than looks?

You know I always wondered why learning a new skill is hard er than l skill, trade or art harder than it looks? You see an expert doing it and they make it look easy and yet when a new person tries, it is difficult. Why is that?

Because experts are experts and have been doing it for ages...?

But why is it harder to learn a new skill?

Because you don't yet have the memory of how to do the thing.

With some things, seeing someone do it makes it look easy, but you don't realize how out of your depth you are until you actually try it yourself.

Also, if you're talented in some areas, you tend to get complacent and encountering something that doesn't come naturally to you seems harder.

True. Am natural pilot, for example. Not so much natural knitter. Find impossible and infuriating.

Experts are people who done a cetain skill many times before. They may make look easy and simple but in reality it is not...

edited 17th Aug '14 10:59:27 AM by GAP

It's kind of not a difficult question to answer here at all.

I suppose not but it does take time and patience to learn a skill.

Muscle memory is a huge part of it. It can only be attained by constant repetition.

First, note that this is not an expert opinion, just lay musings; this idea comes from something that I read some time ago, although I fear that I forget where. ^^;

That said, I think that some of the effect is that part of learning a skill is internalising the elements of it; more or less having your brain write little semi-automatic programs with which to enact the skill. (This would more or less be what we refer to as "muscle memory".)

When you start learning, you have few or none of those "programs", and so are stuck attempting to do a large portion of the skill "manually": "all right, put my leg there, keep my hand up, back straight...". Once you've learned the skill, you have access to those "programs", meaning that you can just issue the high-level commands—"advance, advance, lunge!"—and the relevant "programs" are run at a lower level, beneath your conscious attention, additionally leaving the conscious mind perhaps a little more free than while learning.

edited 17th Aug '14 2:45:40 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

If putting on dresses counts as a skill, I am not an expert.

There's a big gap between seeing and even understanding what someone does, and actually doing it. You could see and describe accurately, say, a golf swing but you couldn't duplicate it just from looking, it takes practice.

Even then, there might be things you wouldn't pick up on from observation alone or wouldn't realize the importance of, like a subtly different way of holding a tool or a certain detail to some movement.

Why does practice take a long time? How long does practice take?

To your first question: if we assume the mechanism that I described in my previous post (and this is my post, so I shall :P), then I recall that the suggested reason for this is that it takes the brain quite a few iterations of a given task to tease out which bits are part of the task, and how they should properly be done.

There may also be elements of clashes with other habits or skills: for example, sport-fencing involves a somewhat unintuitive pose for the legs, involving standing with the thighs out near-horizontal and the shins held at near ninety degrees to the thighs; while still getting used to this pose, it can, I think, be quite easy to slip into a pose in which the legs are held straighter than they should be for fencing, simply because the less-bent pose is closer to one's standard rest pose.

To your second question: this depends heavily on the person and the skill, I believe, including aspects of the person's prior experience (whether supporting or clashing with the new skill), the person's aptitude for the skill, the complexity of the skill, and likely more elements besides.

It's harder to learn something new because an expert performing a skill isn't even the same as that exact same person PRACTICING that skill.

In performance you try to hide mistakes. In rehearsals you tend to stop and iron out problems as best you can. Which is why learning takes such a long time. There's more mistakes (like playing the wrong chord entirely) that you can't hope the audience doesn't notice (like not being staccato on a phrase in the middle).

Is there to avoid getting frustrated with learning a skill?

There's no way to keep from getting frustrated at some point. Just keep practicing and taking feedback if you genuinely want to get better at something, and you will.