Learning a technology is not just learning syntax or APIs. It is also learning a culture.
Languages come with people attached.
I say this most explicitly in How to Learn a Programming Language in 7 Days, where one of the core steps is to study the surrounding community. You can also feel it in 5 Lessons Learned Writing a Clojure Web App and Parens Are Your Friends, where the philosophy and social norms around a language matter just as much as the technical primitives.
What community literacy gives you
- Better intuition for idioms
- Better judgment about tradeoffs
- Better sources for help and examples
- Better understanding of what problems the ecosystem thinks are important
This is one reason copying code without context is so often a trap: code is downstream of values, defaults, and arguments you may not be able to see yet.