[jampekka]

It's also important to learn how to "teach yourself".

Understanding transformers will be really hard if you don't understand basic fully connected feedforward networks (multilayer perceptrons). And learning those is a bit challenging if you don't understand a single unit perceptron.

Transformers have the additional challenge of having a bit weird terminology. Keys, queries and values kinda make sense from a traditional information retrieval literature but they're more a metaphor in the attention system. "Attention" and other mentalistic/antrophomorphic terminology can also easily mislead intuitions.

Getting a good "learning path" is usually a teacher's main task, but you can learn to figure those by yourself by trying to find some part of the thing you can get a grasp of.

Most complicated seeming things (especially in tech) aren't really that complicated "to get". You just have to know a lot of stuff that the thing builds on.