Different people have different balance of skills. I like to use highschool chemistry as the litmus test. On the extremes there are people like me, stereotyped as successful physicists or engineers that love the math side but hated memorizing the tables of ions (poor ability to memorize, good ability to reason), and the people that are stereotyped as successful biologists that hated the math in their chemistry courses but memorized the entire periodic table just by looking at it (tremendous ability to memorize, poor ability to reason). Of course there are also all the people in-between. If you lean towards memorization, obviously if you need an answer, your best bet is to remember when someone told you the answer. If you lean towards reasoning, your best bet is to conceptualize a few fundamentals, and derive the answer on the spot (because you have no hope of recalling it.) This difference means that some people are naturally suited for some fields of study over others, for example the usefulness of recall in biology where everything is a huge tangled web of interacting parts. Another example of these stereotypes in action is the meme that engineers can't spell (which makes sense in the English language, because spelling has little in the way of overarching structure and is mostly recall).

The point of all this being, you have to recognize where you stand on the reasoning-recalling spectrum and adjust your learning strategy accordingly. Something that works for someone on one end might not work at all for someone on the other.

It's not a matter of memorization, at least for me, it is exposure. You can understand the underlying rules without enough exposure to the subjects of those rules.

I suck at memorizing and dont use it as a study technique, but when picking up a new skill I cant say "what are the underlying principles?" because I lack the context.

(Well I can say that, and then I'll get frustrated when no one can express them for me, and the ones that try dont make sense)

I don't really buy this as a real difference.

I suspect that the memorization is just brute force via flashcards or practice and that's more straightforward for people to 'study'. The other method of deriving and actually understanding is generally harder and usually relies on existing knowledge you learned in previous grades (it gets harder to use that method over time if you haven't been). It's also something the teacher may not be capable of either depending on school district.

I'd guess for a large percentage of people they never learn the non-memorization form of studying because they're never really exposed to it and because it's often not rewarded (sometimes it's punished). The brighter kids might pick it up anyway, but I'd suspect they could do the brute force memorization like the other kids if they similarly weren't as capable of it.

>The other method of deriving and actually understanding is generally harder

It's fallacious to think that one type of action can be harder than another type of action, when within each class of actions there is a wide variation in difficulty. Thinking from first principles is not harder than memorization when the first principle is Newton's first law and the memorization is every chemical component of cellular metabolism. Another example of the fallacy would be thinking that the humanities are innately easier than physics: sure, a two-page essay is easier to write than a two-page solution, but you can go in and crank up the number of pages per day a humanities professor is expected to write until it is as hard as you want (it turns out that to some extent this has already happened, you would be surprised if you found out exactly how much output they are expected to have).

In physics, the memorization is easy and the first principles are hard. In biology, the memorization is hard but the first principles are few. That's the origin of why people with biased strengths are better suited to one or the other.

I don't really disagree, but I think you've set up a bit of a strawman - in the general case I think one is more often harder than the other. You can obviously look at extreme outliers for contradictory examples, but the general case is more interesting/common.

There are also some things that are harder or easier for people because we have innate hardware for certain things. Recognizing facial expressions (or really interpreting any sort of visual input) compared to doing complex math in your head. The Type 1 vs. Type 2 systems from thinking fast and slow - some things are generally easier for humans compared to other things.

I think part of this is just highlighting the differences between our language center and the analytic part of our brains. And I also think this differs greatly between individuals (a huge reason why our family home-schools).

For instance, I have never had trouble with things like English grammar and spelling. For grammar, the rules have just always made sense, and, for spelling, usually just seeing the word written down a time or two is enough to remember how to spell it. On the other hand, my 9 year old, who is an even more avid reader than I was at that age, cannot form a grammatically correct sentence or spell even slightly less-than-simple words without referring to a list of rules that she has memorized about how these things are supposed to be done. She's the same in math. She knows she needs to borrow/carry but she hasn't made the leap to understand why (and given her personality, she may never be interested, which is a tough thing to swallow as parents who values learning as much as we do). So the advice in this article would be totally useless to her. Then again, she's a better artist already than I'll ever be.

In the end, I tend to think of this all as healthy. We don't need a thousand thumbs in our body, and we don't need everyone to be interested in understanding lots of things. We need artists, public servants and mothers. We need teachers and garbage truck drivers and child advocates.

I must have expressed myself poorly:

When I try to pick up a new skill, I would start by asking "what are the higher-level rules?" or some variation. Generally speaking, I've had a very, VERY low success rate at getting answers. When I did get answers, they always relied on a context I didn't have, because I was brand new.

Some areas I pick up intuitively, others take work, and others I completely suck at, but in none of them have I been able to START at the higher level understanding. It all requires context, and pushing to get the higher level rules before I have the context has always failed and left me frustrated with either myself (I'm an idiot!) or others (Don't these idiots understand their own jobs?!).

Yes. It's like learning a language by first learning the grammar -- that works if you already have semantic tree of grammar that you can patch in from a related language family (say Portuguese to Spanish), but for most people this doesn't work. Most people need to start by memorizing phrases by rote first.

It's only after we are familiar with the language that the underlying structures emerge.

This applies to learning math too. Unless we are already familiar with the structures in place, we typically first read the axioms, then look at the examples and try to work through some of them to gain familiarity, and then the underlying structure reveals itself to us.

It reminds me of a quote:

"Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, it doesn't bother you any more."

Familiarity precedes true understanding.

This is also why people who read textbooks in a linear passive fashion don't do well in tests. They read and think they know the material, but if they are tested on it, they fail because they haven't truly grappled with the problem space.

> Most people need to start by memorizing phrases by rote first.

The most effective for most people is to hear a large amount of the language being spoken, bootstrap by memorizing a few words, and then reliably get some amount of practice speaking and a lot of additional exposure listening.

Similarly, the best way to learn to write is to do occasional bits of writing with feedback and tons and tons of reading.

Sure, that makes sense. I think whether we pick something up intuitively or not has a lot to do with our past experience and level of pure intellect. To me, being able to quickly internalize new things and cut to the complexities/challenges of those subjects is the basis of genius.

Humans with the ability to explain something in a structured way are rare because it requires a lot of different skills. First you need to know the topic well. Second you need to have emotional intelligence to know to current level of your trainee, to get him/her onboard with the new knowledge. Third you have to think about how to group and link the information you want to communicate. Forth the content must be reduced to the bare minimum and then plan what else should be explored, since learning with a tutor is most times the beginning of a voyage and not the end. This is hard, so people fail at it all the time.

The default – a.k.a fallback method – is to just list all things. This is not only confusing as hell, it is even worse. You never know what you don't know with this methodology, because you have absolutely no context about how something is meant to be use...

For example Books about programming languages often explain only the rules of the language, but totally forgets to explain how the language is used in practice and which tools are commonly used or which homepages have useful content that almost every programmer of language X uses. A greenhorn has understandably a very hard time without all those information.

E.g. setting up a Common Lisp project with Quicklisp which has the code under a namespace takes 20-30 steps (installing Quicklisp using a Lisp REPL, configuring Emacs, configuring the project) – no wonder almost everyone gets lost in the process. And a lot of programming languages are like that.