How to understand "It takes a little bit of getting used to the idea..."?
To get used to something is the act of becoming accustomed or habituated to something. The last entry in an englishgrammarsecrets page about used to says: "We use 'to get used to doing' to talk about the process of something becoming normal for us."
The sentence you ask about says one must get used to some idea about a function, and quantifies how much of the "getting used to" activity is needed, as "a little bit". The grammar is ok, if slightly colloquial.
It takes a little bit of time for getting used to the idea
It's fine, except you want a purpose infinitive (to get used to ...) instead of a gerund complement. Take can take a gerund, but not in this particular configuration.
- Skiing takes some getting used to.
- Skiing takes some time to get used to.
- *Skiing takes some time for getting used to.
This is, by the way, an extremely complex sentence. The part you're asking about mashes three different idioms together (take = require; a little bit of; get used to) in a very complex pattern with a very specific sense.
The diminutive quantifier in the middle (a little bit of) is just a matter of the speaker turning the volume down, in saying that the amount of accustomization (= getting used to) that something requires (= takes) is small. I.e, it's not that difficult.
That's just the first part of the sentence, note. What it takes some time to understand turns out to be the idea of a function that cannot actually be evaluated at any specific point. Which is enough to give anyone pause, given the usual definitions of function.
This Noun Phrase has
- an abstract noun describing
- a function with a special property
- which is described in a passive clause
- with an indefinite subject,
- containing a modal auxiliary (can) and
- containing a negative (not)
- which are conjoined and have overlapping scopes.
That's quite a lot of complexity for such a small sentence.
Though that's the way mathematicians talk, all right.
The sentence isn't really wrong, it's just unnecessarily long and reads a bit strange, but it's grammatical.
Were the author to write:
It takes getting used to the idea ...
It would seem like a process where you just snap from not understanding the idea to just understanding it completely. To avoid this and express that it takes time and possibly even after a longer period of time you still don't understand the reason completely, but are gradually getting to the point instead, they wrote what they wrote.
Basically, it says that it takes a little bit of getting used to it, which can be replaced by a little bit of understanding. Similar to:
To understand what Einstein claims in his theory, you don't necessarily need to be the greatest physicist alive. It takes just a little bit of understanding the physics and having a physicist to explain the problem.
Again, it's a bit clumsy, but definitely is not incorrect.