Presents an experiment in understanding how learners of the Java programming language comprehend its concepts, such as classes, inheritance, interfaces, etc., in lectures and exercises. The authors used an empirical technique to test conjectures about how we learn the programming language. Usually, observations about how we learn a programming language are treated anecdotally. In this experiment, learners received lectures and did an exercise. The comprehension states of the learners were measured by tests in three learning phases. The first phase was before the lecture. In this phase, the learners had no knowledge of the programming language. The second phase was after the lecture and before the exercise. Here, the learners acquired some basic knowledge. The third phase was after the exercise. In this phase, the learners put the acquired knowledge into practice. Factor analysis was used to obtain factors affecting the test result of each learning phase. Changes in comprehension states are explained as a result of tracing the factors between the learning phases.