[abecedarius]

Yeah! Bit of a tangent: in my experience even the times table isn't inherently a grind, though at a higher level maybe arithmetic might have to be. When I was in school faced with memorizing the times table conventionally, I decided "this is silly and boring, what I'm gonna do instead is keep the table visible while I do arithmetic problems, and it'll get memorized automatically along the way", and that worked fine.

It's the same principle as learning touch-typing with the keyboard layout visible on a card in your field of view (not the same as looking down at the keyboard, which I agree is a bad habit that slows you down).