rote learning is incredibly powerful It really is. I had very similar experience with learning Chinese. At first I was all about trying to learn smarter and a

rote learning is incredibly powerful It really is. I had very similar experience with learning Chinese. At first I was all about trying to learn smarter and avoiding the 'outdated' techniques such as rote learning, but several years in I started doing some drills to push my level forward and found that rote learning, and in particular making sure to use active recall rather than passive recall helped immensely. Of course you also need to have deeper thinking and learning going on, but as you mentioned, with rote learning and memorisation all the basics become instantly available at your fingertips and you can expend your mental energy on more productive thought processes.