The understanding comes from knowing when to use that phrase compared with other phrases that might mean similar things. Idiomatic usage to some extent. If learning a language was just remembering direct phrases then machine translation would be trivial
right so "med saken" was the new word, I understood the rest of the phrase. so it took like 4 seconds to understand. it'll take about 10-20 reviews to remember it for good.
so the understanding took far less time than remembering. I could read a whole grammar book 10 times, but if I don't remember any of the words, then I'll never be able to write/say something.
having all the words on the tip of my tongue is no good for communication.
I understand the English words you are using. I’m still not convinced I understand what you are saying. In this particular case recall doesn’t seem to be the problem.
I think it's possible we're not in disagreement at all, but I'm struggling to express the issue: to me, "recall" is the task that takes all the effort, "understanding" is pretty much instant. Therefore "recall" is the bottleneck between me now and me using the word in a conversation or piece of writing.
But it's possible that we have conflicting ideas of what recall/understanding means.
