Probably mostly in how bad are the materials used. Have you ever tried learning a completely new mathematical "thing" using just books, exercises, on-line courses and so on, but without having an "expert explain it to you"?
It's doable, but - being an auto-didact in many other areas too, so I can compare - it's so much harder than most other things you'd like to learn that it's not funny. I don't know the reason, but I doubt it's related to how "math is different" or "math is hard" because it's not: if you have enough intelligence to play with legos you can also do math.
Probably mostly in how bad are the materials used. Have you ever tried learning a completely new mathematical "thing" using just books, exercises, on-line courses and so on, but without having an "expert explain it to you"?
It's doable, but - being an auto-didact in many other areas too, so I can compare - it's so much harder than most other things you'd like to learn that it's not funny. I don't know the reason, but I doubt it's related to how "math is different" or "math is hard" because it's not: if you have enough intelligence to play with legos you can also do math.