I’ve no academic background in math either, as I studied arts… but working with 3D for quite a while, we start to know what normals are, how normals maps are encoded, reading the papers where those technics were suggested, consulting some math books, making a script for this, a script for that… after a while it all starts to make more sense. I know math books can be very intimidating, and normally not very well illustrated also… It took me some time, for example, to understand what we could do with vectors… before that, I couldn’t just ‘see’ what was going on.
The trully sugestion is to have fun learning it, be curious… You won’t learn it if you don’t enjoy it. 