How to Learn Statistics

Tl;dr: you can't. 

Just kidding, but this will be a short read, so you won't need a tl;dr. 

You can't learn statistics, because the kind of statistics you are probably interested in learning is not really a scientific discipline, let alone a branch of mathematics. It's a craft, like surgery. You do need to learn some basic anatomy (random variables, hypothesis testing, etc.), but these concepts won't become intuitive until you start practicing. 

The best way to master a craft is through apprenticeship. Take any statistics 101 course and look for a research internship. Most labs do statistics at some point or another. Make sure there is actually somebody in the lab who knows statistics well, though they don't necessarily need to be a statistician.  

Once you start reading on how to do the thing your senior colleague told you to do, you will encounter terminology that sounds like everyday language but has specific, often unintuitive definitions in the context of statistics. If you're not familiar with those definitions, you will find yourself re-reading the same sentence multiple times, wondering why it doesn't make sense. 

The trick is to treat each word as a potential technical term, and look up each one to make sure you understand it fully. Spaced repetition will speed up this process a lot.

As a concluding remark, ChatGPT agreeing with my analogy: