At what point did you start to understand JavaScript?

Javascript is tough to learn. Probably in my opinion one of the toughest languages to write. I can read it much better than I can write, thus leaving me to heavily rely on jQuery for most basic tasks. At some point I'd love to learn more vanilla JS.

A little detour. While console.log doesn't seem to have a purpose right now, later on you'll likely find yourself using it to check your JS script at various points. When I'm building a script, I will put in console.log on variables or other parts of the script, just as a checkpoint basically. I can see what's going on. It's kinda like the var_dump() of php.

I do think that the Javascript Foundations course does need a re-work. I had similar issues to you. I struggled to get through it. Best analogy I can give as to what you might be facing, because it's what I was facing.

You're taught all of the components of Javascript without context. It's like if you were in an automotive class and had never seen car before, and the instructor starts showing you the suspension, the motor, the electrical system, but you have no idea how these components actually fit together.

When you finally see the big picture that is the Javascript language, the sum of the parts will make sense. I think it's easier to reverse engineer this language, by learning it as part of a JS heavy project first.

I feel I can read it. I too found it rather frustrating, mainly for the interactive course that follows, as I kept encountering errors, that my gut instinct was that they were not wrong... I too cheat, then realise that I was right the first time and I discovered for one the issue was my browser (though that is good practice for the real world) and some others were due to the video showing spaces in things, yet me removing them made my submissions work, and finally my emulator on here was misbehaving. I do not in the slightest feel confident that I can write Javascript, any OOP takes years to master, but I would like to see more advanced ones to hopefully help to understand it more.

The interactive course I found good, but I never felt it was explained to me why we were doing what we were doing, and what each section did. Visualising bits linking to each other is the best way I managed, but I doubt it matters too much, as JQuery is far more usable, and is the next step I'm yet to look at.

Try codecademy.com. There the courses are different. At the very beginning you must start coding. I haven't done a lot there because I'm manly on TreeHouse (WordPress, CSS) but a few daysago I've discovered codecademy and it looked very promising.

Constantijn Asamoah You could combine your training here with codeschool's javaScript foundation course. Then, of course, there is the newly added JavaScript Basics Course on Treehouse. Apparently it will be a lot better. So try these, and remember that practice makes perfect.