Clearly you are trolling, but what the hell...

it is unthinkable to me that someone needs to take a course to learn some language. Why cannot you just read the mannual?

I used to think like this too. Indeed, there is quite an ego boost associated with mastering a subject by merely reading up on it.

A few months ago, I was talking with my favorite professor (for whom I have the utmost respect) about our respective research. I admitted to him that I tried reading one of his papers, but that it all went over my head.

I was surprised when he told me that, for the most part, he never bothers reading papers anymore. The papers in the literature are generally written so that someone who already knows the material can verify its correctness, but someone new to the material cannot always gain a firm understanding. So if there is some new research he wants to know about, he flies out to the see the people doing the research and spends a few days with them to find out what he wants to know. He couldn't understand the stubbornness of some of his colleagues in his own building, who try to gain understanding of his complicated research from the papers alone, and with too much pride to ever walk down the hallway to talk to him about it.

Bottom line: There's no shame in learning something in a two-way channel. It's a pretty smart way to do it.