How Long Does It Take to Learn Python?

The Four Stages of Competence

Instead, you’ll use a different framework that follows the four stages of competence for assessing your learning progress:

To make the four stages of competence more accessible, you’ll see the following short names to refer to each of the four stages:

1. Unawareness for unconscious incompetence
2. Awareness for conscious incompetence
3. Ability for conscious competence
4. Expertise for unconscious competence

You can read about what each of the stages stands for further down in this section. When you learn about time estimates for learning Python later on in this article, you’ll use the four stages of competence as a framework. But there’s a twist! You’ll shift your focus to the learning process that takes place in between the different stages and concentrate on the mind shift that takes you from one phase to the next. You’ll read about how to get from:

1. Unawareness to awareness
2. Awareness to ability
3. Ability to expertise

You’ll see that each of the four stages of competence covers similar grounds as the classic beginner-intermediate-expert model. However, this alternate framework makes it easier for you to find your spot on the progression right now, which can give you actionable insight about how to keep moving from unawareness towards expertise:

To identify when you’ve moved from one phase to the next, you should primarily rely on your self-assessment of your progress. Time estimates can support you in that, but you shouldn’t use them as rigid rules. Many factors influence each person’s learning progress, and you’ll go over some of these factors later on in this article.

To improve the time estimates a bit, you’ll find an additional measure of progress based on how many projects you’ve completed. Try to assess your progress from one learning phase to the next as a combination of the time you’ve spent and the number of projects you’ve completed.

Remember that these are only estimates. You’ll likely see yourself going faster or slower than described. As your ultimate self-assessment, focus on keeping track of transitions in your state of mind, which can indicate a switch from one phase to another. In the end, it’s essential that you keep working on projects, keep track of your progress, and enjoy yourself while you do. You’ll see your skills grow over time.

Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence (Unawareness)

For every skill that’s new to you, you’ll start at the stage of unconscious incompetence. That term probably doesn’t sound very encouraging. However, once you read Wikipedia’s definition of this stage, you see that it’s just a practical term to describe a familiar state of mind:

The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn. (Source)

You don’t know what you don’t know. You won’t learn something if you don’t accept that you don’t know it, and you also probably won’t understand what you don’t want to learn.

Graduating from this first stage might take only a couple of moments. Nevertheless, it’s a crucial step for learning anything new and it often doesn’t get enough attention.

Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence (Awareness)

Once you’re aware that Python is a programming language that you want to learn more about, your active time investment begins. At this point, you’re at the stage of conscious incompetence:

Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, they recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage. (Source)

It’ll take time and effort to progress through this stage. This investment is what people often think about when they talk about learning something new.

Stage 3: Conscious Competence (Ability)

If you think that you’ve successfully graduated from the previous phase of the four stages of competence, then you’ve achieved conscious competence:

The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill. (Source)

You’ll have a working ability in Python at this stage, which might already be enough for your needs. You can apply programming knowledge to improve workflows in your current job or to build your own projects. You probably have enough Python knowledge to get an entry-level position as a software developer. While programming with Python will still take you a lot of conscious effort, you can get stuff to work.

During this stage, however, you don’t have enough practice to be fluent and proficient. Moving to unconscious competence in Python will require even more time and effort from your side.

Stage 4: Unconscious Competence (Expertise)

Once you’ve reached unconscious competence, you’re able to use your tools seemingly without any effort. In this stage, you can use Python in the same way that a great musician uses their instrument. A proficient guitarist doesn’t focus on holding their guitar but instead focuses on the music they create. They can wield their instrument precisely and playfully.

Once you can move the tools you’re using into the background and you realize that your focus is primarily on creating, you’ve achieved unconscious competence:

The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become “second nature” and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned. (Source)

True expertise in Python programming might feel far away from where you’re standing right now. That’s completely normal and okay! No musician starts as an expert handler of their instrument. Expertise requires years of consistent training. And even once they reach expertise in one topic, many people return to the previous stage of the four stages of competence to develop their skills in another area.

When some programmers talk about how they never stop learning, they’re describing their progress from ability towards expertise in just one area of their work. While you might eventually gain expertise in one field where Python is used, there are many more where you’ll keep working and slowly progress from ability onwards.

From Unawareness to Awareness

To step from unawareness into awareness, you’ll need to accept that you don’t know Python yet and that you want to know it. You’ll need to be ready to invest your time and effort into studying the Python ecosystem:

The good news is that you’ve already taken this step. You already know Python exists and that you want to invest in learning it, and you know why you should learn Python. Therefore, you’ll most likely find yourself somewhere in the next step of your progression through the four stages of competence.

From Awareness to Ability

To move from awareness to ability, you need to work through online tutorials and courses, grapple with many new concepts, and introduce yourself to the world of programming and the Python ecosystem. That includes thinking, reading, listening, building, creating, and often also arduously hacking away on your keyboard without much immediate reward. Building your Python ability requires determination and focus.

However, Python can help you get up to speed relatively quickly because it’s a beginner-friendly language that reads similarly to English. If you have proficiency in English, you can start writing basic Python code logic in just a few days.

You won’t build fully-fledged programs in only a few days, but you might be able to run small scripts that you wrote yourself. At this point, however, you haven’t reached the stage of ability yet. For this, you’ll need to build an understanding of at least the following Python programming concepts:

• Python’s syntax
• Data types
• Flow control structures, such as the for loop, the while loop, and conditional statements
• Functions and scopes
• Decorators, generators, and iterators
• Classes and object-oriented programming
• Best practices for writing Pythonic code
• Popular packages in the standard library, such as pathlib and collections

You’ll also need to learn more than just Python if you want to build functioning programs or apply for a job. You’ll need to understand some fundamental software development principles and how to use them in Python.

You should know how to:

• Set up your Python development environment
• Manage Python dependencies
• Debug your code to find and fix errors
• Write and handle exceptions
• Test your Python apps
• Understand modules and packages and how to use popular packages in Python’s extensive third-party ecosystem

Tackling all of these topics and understanding these concepts requires a lot of training and time investment. How much exactly is hard to say and will be different for everyone. As a guideline, you can likely get there in about four months of consistent and focused study of at least four hours each day:

Start by learning Python’s syntax and fundamental programming concepts, then focus on a specific library that you need to solve your challenge. Having a particular task to tackle can help you keep your direction, consistently practice what you’re learning, and move faster from awareness towards ability in Python.

If you read online that someone learned Python quickly, then they were probably talking about this phase. Depending on your prior experience, you can learn enough Python relatively quickly that you’ll have the ability to work with the language. After you’ve gained this ability, you’ll step into the next phase, which is where most programmers spend most of their time.

From Ability to Expertise

Moving from ability to expertise takes a lot of time and practice, and the idea of becoming a “Python expert” is a little misleading. You’ll probably never be an expert in all of Python, and that’s okay! Most seasoned Python developers are only experts in a specific field:

• Web development
• REST API programming
• Data science
• Machine learning
• GUI programming
• Pygame game development
• DevOps
• Embedded programming

This list isn’t exhaustive, and for each field, there’s a lot to learn. Your progression from ability to expertise will be separate for each area. You can be an expert in any of these topics while still being a complete beginner in another area.

Continuously practicing the libraries and concepts that you need for your chosen field allows you to become an expert in that niche.

A Django expert, for example, will have enough proficiency with the framework to code an application without consulting the documentation, or perhaps they’ll just need to search for particular topics. It’ll be similar for any other field.

Coding at this level of fluency requires a lot of practice. With practice, the skill becomes second nature, and the Python syntax, code logic, and libraries you’re using will fade into the background. Once you’re there, you can focus your cognitive effort on solving the problems at hand without needing to think about the tools you’re using to solve them.

Keep practicing what you’re most interested in and train the programming concepts and Python libraries that you find the most helpful for your tasks. Adopt a mindset of working towards expertise in one field for which Python is used, and stay comfortable with the idea that there’s always more to learn:

There’s no end to your learning journey when studying with Python. You may want to make yourself comfortable in this phase of the four stages of competence because you’ll likely spend a good amount of your time here.