Learning the core of the language

It’s common to see people and/or programs advocate for learning set phrases, memorizing conjugations, etc. Of course memorization is needed for starting certain parts like learning the alphabet of a given language (if it has one), but I believe that nearly every time you memorize you are taking a shortcut that limits your understanding.

If your goal is to learn a few set phrases for travel, or to get a jumpstart on the awkward phase of starting to have conversations, than memorization can have its place, but in general its often counterproductive. The reason is that it will speed you up in the short term, while slowing you down in the long term.

To take a simple example, we can take the phrase “My name is John”. If we memorize it, we can quickly have a phrase to say to someone, but if we take the time to really break down the sentence and understand each part (understand, not memorize), than we have actually learned a lot. In the next few days of study we might learn the words for “nearby” and “house”, and we can effortlessly construct the sentence “My house is nearby”. If we were learning by memorizing phrases, these two sentences might seem different but similar, whereas they are actually sharing the exact same basic structure with new vocabulary.