[rck]

This is all good advice. When I taught algorithms, the difference in performance between students who stepped through the algorithms by hand on small examples and students who just memorized pseudocode was tremendous.

One thing that can make "talking and writing" even more useful is to do it on a whiteboard in front of someone. Then, not only are you practicing the algorithm, you're also practicing whiteboard coding, which is useful for interviews and a lot of day-to-day technical communication.