How do you practice programming java for beginners?

Use the software you have available to you and just create something small using code you know i.e. set yourself a task or project. Once you have it working or not working you could always show it to/send it to your tutor asking if they could review it and provide any feedback on it. Your tutor should be available to answer anything you give them regardless of if it is to do with assignments or not.

You could always try and see if there is a possibility to book a one to one session with your tutor to go through work you have done for example a 1 hour session a month say

You could also try to set meetings up with someone else in your lessons on the course to work through things outside of lessons. They could review code you have done giving you feedback or what they did differently/think could be done differently and you could also do the same. You could again try setting yourselves a little side project.

Yeah good question. There is a lot to learn and sometimes people try to do too much at the same time. You need to tell us more about what your assignments require. If you have basic knowledge of the syntax then the next thing you should learn is data structures and algorithms. There is so much info about DSA online its not difficult to find. You can practice online coding questions and compare your answer with the solutions(leetcode).

Next you need to learn about object-oriented programming(OOP) and design patterns. I am assuming you already know a bit of OOP since you are using Java. There are some good resources for this here: Language Books/Tutorials for popular languages - Stack Overflow. You can use these books as guidelines to practice programming.

After this, you should learn about concurrency and multi-threading. This is the hardest topic but it is quite important for building desktop applications. I think this may be beyond the scope of first year. I don't know of any good Java books you would need to google this yourself. The book I use is "C++ Concurrency in action". This is considered as the gold standard for learning multi-threading with examples in C++. However, the concepts are directly transferrable to any programming language.

Is using for example (LeetCode) sufficient for me to practice or would I need to make a small project and then using chatgpt to review it ( or like stackoverflow) to review my code a good way to learn? I'm just very stuck and I don't want to rely on my tutors/ peers to review my code and want to do this on a daily basis.