Don't go too far though: you don't go from printing the alphabet and reversing it to suddenly making it appear on a diagonal on the screen with a gradient of colors. Take small steps. Learning is a long and iterative process, and you need to approach problems with increasing levels of difficulty (for instance, see how I usually think of explaining recursion).

• http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/152745/learn-programming-backwards-or-so-i-failed-the-fizzbuzz-test-now-what/152746#152746
• http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/151229/im-having-trouble-learning/151242#151242

Don't go too far though: you don't go from printing the alphabet and reversing it to suddenly making it appear on a diagonal on the screen with a gradient of colors. Take small steps. Learning is a long and iterative process, and you need to approach problems with increasing levels of difficulty (for instance, see how I usually think of explaining recursion).

• Learn programming backwards, or "so I failed the FizzBuzz test. Now what?"
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/151229/im-having-trouble-learning/151242#151242

A Quick Foreword

Learn By Doing: Knowledge vs Know-How

Your Study Process

The Basic Workflow

It's Just Learning - A Comparison

A Quick Foreword

Learn By Doing: Knowledge vs Know-How

Your Study Process

The Basic Workflow

It's Just Learning - A Comparison

It's Just Learning - A Comparison

Your problem is actually not related to programming at all. It's the same problem thousands of people encounter when they try to learn maths.

If you give them a problem, they don't see how to work their way to the solution. However, if you write down the solution for them, most will understand it and think "darn, that was so simple!". Yet you'll give them a similar problem with different measures and hypotheses and they'll fail to solve it: they didn't understand the logic behind it, and they need practice to be able to do it themselves.

Note that this is a common problem with maths, but in my opinion you see it in tons of other fields where there's some logic required: learning solfege, language grammar, physics, etc... And it's not down to a "natural" ability to understand these things: it just comes down to practice (be it in that area, or in others that lead the individual to grasp concepts in this field more easily).

There's no reason you can't learn to write code. You just jave to keep trying until you reach that "ah AH!" / Eureka moment. Then move on to the next, harder, problem.