[wjagodfrey]

A good practice is to seek out incomprehensible pieces of code and figure them out so you can perfectly describe how they work.

I don't do it as much as I should, but it's the best way of learning about a language.

[chaosphere2112]

This is my usual technique for learning a new system, though it's usually bug or feature driven; lots of tracing through every single line of the 1000 line function