[sebmellen]

Of course, I understand this, and I hope that my comment didn't come across as saying that math would be easier to "do" if it were all fully verbal. Symbolic reasoning and interpretation are necessary for complex reasoning.

And math is, as you know, a deep but traversable graph. The traversal inherently requires a familiarity with the nodes you pass through when reaching a foreign or more difficult concept.

However, I'll give you an example. If I read through more complex math that I’m not comfortable with in Sage, I can build an intuition for the structure of the problem more easily than if I view the “raw” notation. In that sense, it is easier to for me to “approach” — but approaching something is very different from fluently using it — and I’m under no illusion that approaching a topic is the same as beginning to understand it.

Again, this is definition-dependent. To me, “approaching” something means beginning to glean how I might one day understand it. E.g. watching a 3B1B video feels like “approaching” a topic. Here we reach the limits of language already :)