[junon]

Once I ditched the hydraulic analogy and really tried to internalize charge, current, voltage, etc. is when I finally started to understand why the hydraulic analogy "works" but only for people who already understand electricity.

Electricity behaves in many ways just like water (just at a significantly faster time scale) but I don't think it actually helped me learn how it all worked to start with.

[r_lee]

This is a common problem in all fields IMO. It's easy for many to fall into the "It's like X" but it only makes sense if you already have the information needed in your head to connect the dots

Which is why I also don't generally like analogies and the kind

[foobarchu]

This reminds me a lot of the car analogy that gets used to (poorly) teach object oriented programming.