Its a acquired taste.
Generally you have to associate and visualise symbols mentally and learn it, grass is probably the hardest thing to look at and understand at first because its a lot of colour and symbols all over the place describing usually three types of grass, whereas all other creatures and things go off identifiable symbols (Common mistake is looking at O creatures and thinking they are trees, such as Ogres, which at a glance at ASCII, is understandable for even a veteran glancing to mistake)
(K - dwarf mode) & (L - Adventure mode) are your friends for scribing what you're looking at, until you generally accustom and learn it.
first time i played df, took me 30 minutes to figure out how to gen a world and then embark.
once i did embark, my dwarves died before i even figured out how to mine XD
but yeah DF is an amazingly difficult game to learn, and its ye olde DOS level graphics dont help. though once you do learn it, its not that bad
hmm... i wonder if it would be possible to make df run on DOS. i mean ik that as it is now it wouldent work, but im talking just as a theoretical example, if DF was built to run DOS from the start.
i would be interested to see a very basic version of DF that runs in DOS as some kind of little experiment to see if it would be at all possible.