this has to be the toughest program to learn alone

[Anonymous]

Hi i'm a student and about to give up on archicad. How are people supposed to learn this program. There's no decent tutorials except the pre-programmed soul less and useless ones that ship with graphisoft, (sound like steven hawkins narrates them). i'm at one of the best architectural schools in London,
and nobody knows how to use this program, students or lecturers. There is no classes anywhere,no books anywhere, It a shame iv always tried to promote this program whilst everyone else championed Rhino, Vectorworks or Microstation. I got Vectorworks a couple of days ago and in one night i know more about that program than months toying with archicad and i'm booked on a full day Vectorworks course( 80% student discount!) recommended by VW.
Truthfully feel iv wasted a lot of time on this un- user friendly program.

[furtonb]

I think it's really rare that people teach the programs in the design/engineering/structural context that is otherwise taught at universities. In the case of the GS materials, they barely touch "mundane" examples, e.g. modelling the different materials in a thermal envelope. You could create a separate playlist just for this issue, the flat roof sloping, the fire/water related material changes, etc. Or showing a conceptual workflow from a large scale programmatic/massing stage to a scale of 1:100 (... people still think in paper scale to determine the granularity... which LOD is that exactly?:)). It's really hard to put all the necessary pieces together from the available materials.

An interesting thing is overcoming the linguistic difference used in BIM and other subjects (you will hear about 1:100 in one course and LOD300 in another, for instance), it takes time to map the fields in a student's head, but this is not at all specific to ARCHICAD in my opinion.

I really like Heimo's tutorials, but not everyone speaks German, so his videos have limited reach in this sense. I also like John's CONTRABIM channel, that is some seriously quality material there: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZmbHudYCK6YxKLHZ2fF7jw

I could imagine a series where architects/engineers and their BIM people (or if they are BIM-savvy, themselves) sit down and go through recent problems, what it meant to solve it - both on "paper" and in the model.

[Erwin Edel]

In NL our reseller offers great (online) courses from beginner to advanced. Not sure if it still holds true as we haven't taken on interns in a while, but we would be able to send them off for a free 4 day course. After these 4 days all I needed to teach them is about actual engineering things like beam dimensions and not how to set those dimensions in the tool in ArchiCAD.

Teaching yourself by trial and error takes a huge amount of time. If you can justify the cost in hours, of course go for that. But I would always recommend getting a proper entry course from your local reseller, if they offer it.

The AC YouTUBE things are more for in depth snippets about very specific tools. Ussually these are diving in to the new additions to that ArchiCAD version. The entry level course is so generic since it is supposed to teach something to every country out there. As such it's not very useful. You are learning things in the wrong template (most likely). Get taught using the local version with the template that goes with it.

[3dpl]

Actually, it's one of the more rational, logical 3D architectural programs around and you produce a working digital model in exactly the same way as you would on a construction site (from foundation upwards). It has all the tools you need to do the job using generic to composite elements and complex profiles. The Morph tool is very powerful and can produce elements of any shape that might be difficult to produce using the standard tools. Making purpose made library parts including doors and windows or furniture is very easy. Make no mistake, it is a very powerful and complete program

[Laszlo Nagy]

If you search YouTube for "Archicad basic tutorial", the first several results are all good thing to watch to learn many of the basics:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=archicad+basic+tutorial