Different people learn differently. Some people don't like to practice the trivial practice stuff, and prefer to breeze through the beginning, read through new material, and then take on some real project.

Rich Hickey, recently in an interview, said he doesn't do programming exercises - he is not interested in programs which don't make the computer do something useful, interesting, or both.

I, for one, type the trivial examples. Or else, I simply forget how to use them. For example, you have list comprehensions in Python, Racket, F# and if you ask me to do a list comprehension right now without looking up the reference, the only one I will get right is Python. I recently started learning F# and didn't type much code; so the concept is known, but since I didn't practice the syntax, I will have to learn it again.

That's what he means by practicing syntax.