# Beginner Issues with Installation/Use **URL:** \ **Category:** Getting Started\ **Tags:** usage, install\ **Created:** [August 24, 2021, 9:31pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/beginner-issues-with-installation-use/4615 "2021-08-24T21:31:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Dawudis](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/dawudis/32/2357_2.png) [@Dawudis](https://support.prodi.gy/u/Dawudis)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2021, 9:31pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/beginner-issues-with-installation-use/4615/1 "2021-08-24T21:31:23Z")
I'm a beginner programmer in Machine Learning and NLP. For a project I'm working on, I need Prodigy to pretrain an NER model. However, I am having issues running it. I made a new environment and installed prodigy in the terminal, but the recipes or any commands for that matter aren't working. Am I doing something wrong? I am using Conda and Visual Studio Code, is there an issue there. Is there anything else I need to install. Is it possible I could get a more beginner level tutorial on how to install/use Prodigy for myself? ---
**Author:** ![ines](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/ines/32/3_2.png) [@ines](https://support.prodi.gy/u/ines)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2021, 12:49am UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/beginner-issues-with-installation-use/4615/2 "2021-08-25T00:49:22Z")
Hi! What exactly do you mean by "not working"? Are you seeing an specific error? If you haven't seen it yet, the first steps guide is a good place to start if you're new to Prodigy: [https://prodi.gy/docs#first-steps](https://prodi.gy/docs#first-steps) (However, what you describe sounds more like an installation or environment problem related to pip/conda and your Python environment and not specifically Prodigy itself.) If you're just getting started with NLP, I'd also recomment checking out the spaCy 101 guide and usage documentation: [https://spacy.io/usage/spacy-101](https://spacy.io/usage/spacy-101)