After solving almost all of the array/hash basics exercises without much trouble, I felt confident that I had begun to really understand the basics. In the picture up top, I write out the answer and then I check to see if I’m right. I was on two; the last I was a bit confused. After seeing this problem many times, the split method seemed to make sense. Yay! Moving on the Easy 1 exercises, I was stuck on for about 2 hours, trying to work through it and understand. My ‘solution’ was completely wrong. The only thing that made sense was using the Array#count method on the ‘vehicles’ array. Everything else was totally confusing. It’s extremely frustrating because I felt there was a huge jump from the simple problems to this and I don’t know why. Am I supposed to have an idea by now of what should be done? Looking at other peoples’ solutions had me even more confused. Their solutions seemed very complex. I wonder if they have had prior knowledge before, or it just comes easy to them. I try not to think about that stuff but it’s hard. Accessing key/values and elements in an array, especially when their both used together just doesn’t make sense to me and after lots of careful reading it finally does, a little. That worries me. I read the book, many times, and I’ve done the exercises many times too, but there’s a gap in my knowledge. I’m too tired to figure out what to do right now so I just have to look at it tomorrow.

This is the problem. I did write out the entire pedac process and felt confident that I had a working solution. Not at all actually, was the case. At least I had the correct method. I saw the hash rocket symbol, but it never occured to me to actually create a new hash and ‘simply’ add new key-value pairs to it. I don’t think I even knew how to do that before this exercise. Is that the point of these exercises? To show us things that we should be doing if we encounter this sort of problem? Are we supposed to have any slight idea of a way to solve them? I’m sorry for anyone reading this: I know I’m being super negative right now, but it’s either I write it out or it’ll just stay in my head and bother me. Anyway, thanks for listening.