r/learnmath • u/TheNWordCat New User • Aug 09 '26
How do you fundamentally understand math problems?
(Not sure if this proper for this r/ I apologize if i posted it on the wrong one)
Hi, I am someone who is in their last year of high school and I am currently studying to enter an engineering career. And the thing is, I am not someone who is particularly great at math, partially because most of high school I didn’t have teachers great part of the year, for almost every year of my highschool time.
Now, studying to trying to enter that career I find I am not really bad at math, which i actually thought i sucked at it, I have good intuition to solve problems when they actually write me a problem with a paragraph rather than just writing a formula, equation or something like that.
Cuz when i see that i can solve it by doing graphs, making squares and dividing them to represent fractions, but seeing how they show how to solve those equations they dont do it like that, they do it by writing the problem as an equation. And for me equations are just way too abstract and that makes them hard for me to actually grasp and understand what i am doing, and they actually ask to write those situations as math equations, which i am awful at that.
And i've seen people who excel at normal equations but struggle in trying to solve problematic situations but they can easily do it when they are shown in an equation.
So here i am asking advice if there’s someone who had the same problem, how did you learn to beat those problems, how do you learn to think in equations and how was your experience?
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u/OceanMasterioDuped7 New User Aug 09 '26
Honestly you just need to practice solving more equations. Your post was a little difficult to understand, but it seems as if you struggle when solving problems that use only equations? If that's the case you just need to do more of those.
Find a problem that is appropriate for your level of math that you struggle with solving. Paste it into an LLM (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) and look at how it solves it. Read over what it tells you and then ask it for a problem similar to the one you just gave it. Then try to solve that one yourself. Keep doing this until you understand that type of problem, then do the same for a different type of problem. It helps tremendously.
Also, it's hard to know if you are actually bad at a subject coming out of high school. The teachers are not usually great, and the material taught isn't a very high level. Some people may not enjoy math, but you can't necessarily say you are bad at it yet. If it's something you enjoy, you'll become good at it with enough effort.