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Highly accented English indeed is the worst.
But if, as a non-native English speaker, you find something presented in your native language, it actually might be easier to grok.
So to all the Indians out there trying to flood Youtube with badly recorded Hinglish:
Try recording in Hindi and titling the video in Devanagari. There are more than 500 million Hindi speakers in india - surely that is big enough a market to not having to make actual English content harder to find for the people interested in that. Thank you. -
The contents of the course are written right there. You can figure out if it will be useful or not, so far it has worked fine for me. If they are unclear I stay the fuck away.
If you only use the course and don't build something along with it, you obviously won't retain much. That goes for whatever method you decide to use to learn. You mix up your study with practice of something you want to build.
I've had pretty good courses from non native speakers, namely Germans and French, and as long as they had an understandable accent they were fine.
You can also refund them, I did it with the one bad course I got. -
I've done quite a few Udemy courses and have mostly reached the same conclusion. They're not always an efficient way to learn, but they're also not really targeted for that kind of an audience.
Udemy courses are good for the really inexperienced -- there was a time I was one, so it was good for example that a web development course I took went into depths and took it slowly.
Now that I am a more experienced developer, if I want to genuinely learn how to use something, it's mostly reading documentation and trying to build something.
I believe the important summary here is that you simply need to know when it's no longer optimal to learn that way and move on. -
My main issue with "skip the tutorials, rely on the docs" advice is twofold.
1. Only works for smaller libraries targeting a specific scope of functionality.
Larger libraries, frameworks and languages like Express, React, Flutter, etc, require you to have a solid high level overview of how everything works. Docs usually skip this in favour of a bottom up approach. I like to start by watching a tech conference presentation on it first. It works wonders.
2. Most docs are of subpar quality. Until recently, even React was infamous for having abysmal documentation that was a slog to read through. Back when I was getting started, watching a 1 hour tutorial saved me a whole week of torture, potentially
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Udemy courses are targeted at ABSOLUTE beginners. It's excruciating to pull through and finish the course "just because". And some of these courses are jam-packed with 30-60 hours just for them to appear legit, but the reality is the value you get could be packed to 3-5 hours.
You're better off just searching for or watching for the things that you need on Google or YouTube.
You'll learn more when building the actual stuff. Yes, it's good to go for the documentation. Just scratch the "Getting Started" section and then start building what you want to build already. Don't read the entire documentation from cover to cover for the sake of reading it. You won't retain everything anyway. Use it as a reference. You'll gain wisdom through tons of real-world experience. You will pick things up along the way.
Don't watch those tutorials with non-native English speakers or those with a bad accent as well. Native speakers explain things really well and deliver the message with clarity because they do what they do best: It's their language.
Trust me, I got caught up in this inefficient style a handful of times. Don't waste your time.
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