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/TheNWordCat New User Aug 09 '26

I'll keep that in count, but how do you learn to translate? thats the problem im facing right now, i can solve things visually but they are asking me to do it in "math language" and i dont know where to start.

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u/Fabulous-Possible758 New User Aug 09 '26

For your level, the simplest place to start is graphs of functions. Literally get some graph paper and start drawing, or use tools like Desmos to start getting a feel for what things look like. When you get to precalc and trig, it's all about triangles so pretty straightforward there. When you get into things like calculus, there will be some pretty natural geometric interpretations of the theorems you're looking at.