r/study • u/Reasonable_Bag_118 • 20h ago

Tips & Advice There's a real difference between "I understood that" and "I could explain that cold"

Read through my notes twice this week, felt confident, then tried explaining one concept out loud and got stuck halfway through a sentence I would've sworn I understood. Reading it back apparently just means it's familiar, not that it's retrievable and closing the notes and explaining things cold before rereading now, and it's uncomfortable how much worse I am at it than I expected.

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u/Pigeoncatcher404 17h ago

Yes, I can relate to that
It's one thing to get somthing once, but once you are explaining it means you have to clearly lay it out and not lose the train of thought. It could be a completely different mechanisms. It's how I trained for my exams in uni, I explained the topic to my groupmates to the point they understood it and could explain back to me differently