I never bothered learning them either (apart from the squares, which stuck quickly for some reason) - I just got fast enough at working them out from known valu

I never bothered learning them either (apart from the squares, which stuck quickly for some reason) - I just got fast enough at working them out from known values (squares, 10x is trivial, 5x is half of that) that no one could really tell the difference. I think it actually helped me in some ways, because those "tricks" (mentally breaking it down into simpler steps) generalise to larger numbers quite well.