Fountain is designed to “just work” if you simply typed some text that looked like a screenplay. You would only need to learn the syntax if you wanted to take advantage of the “power user” features, such as “forced” formatting, or emphasis. When you first look at a Fountain document in a text editor, you’ll see some special characters, but it will probably be quite clear to you what they mean. Most importantly though, you can work on your screenplay without needing to know anything about the syntax. The next time you open that same document in a Fountain-compatible app, all the new work will be there, formatted as you’d expect.