[rmbyrro]

This is a common misconception not supported by scientific evidence.

What experimental psychology and neuroscience research has found is that the better people memorize topics, the better they understand and reason about them.

For those interested, this book has the best compilation I've seen of such research: https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Alan-Baddeley/dp/1138326097

Edit: Of course, you can memorize things without any effort to understand. But if you are making these efforts, having an efficient and effective memorization technique can help a LOT.

[jvvw]

One of the things that puzzles me is when I see say Anki flashcards for mathematics things that I never learned like that. I never intentionally learned anything in mathematics in that was and it feels very 'wrong' to me when I see people trying to learn like that. I did a lot of practice looking back, but there was absolutely no conscious memorisation - the nearest I got was at university level when I would sometimes run through the main steps in a long proof before the exams, but it would be at quite a high level when I did.

I don't know if I'm just lucky in terms of how my brain works in some way and I found I had a pretty good 'natural' memory when it came to things like learning languages, and I appreciate that this is totally anecdotal. That book looks interesting however and as somebody who teaches, I'm interested in what works for everybody, not just me.

[rmbyrro]

SRS is not meant as the basis of learning. You study and learn first, then you input what you've learned in SRS, and it'll help you to solidify those learnings and keep them readily available when you need them in practice.

[UltimateEdge]

I am always deathly afraid of forgetting a definition/key result in an exam.

Whenever I practice, I always have my notes in front of me and I focus on puzzling through the problem at hand rather than testing my memory.

But in an exam, for me there us always the possibility of failing to recall some fact. To combat this, I record every not-completely-obvious fact into Anki and aggressively practice it in the run-up to the exam.

[CuriouslyC]

The multiplication tables and two digit arithmetic are 100% memorization, and more challenging multiplication/arithmetic is just learning to break the problems into memorized chunks and then combine them. Math is 100% memorization.