I learned it by asking peers in grad school what stuff meant. And working through the math myself (it was a slog at first) and then writing stuff out it in LaTe

I learned it by asking peers in grad school what stuff meant. And working through the math myself (it was a slog at first) and then writing stuff out it in LaTeX. When one is forced to learn something because one needs to take courses and to graduate, the human brain someone figures out a way. A lot of it is convention, so you do need a social approach - ie asking others in your field. For me it was my peers, but these days there’s Math stack exchange, google, and math forums. Also, first few chapters of an intro Real Analysis text is usually a good primer to most common math notation. When I started grad school I didn’t know many math social norms, like the unstated one that vectors (say x) were usually in column form by convention unless otherwise stated (in undergrad calc and physics, vectors we’re usually in row form). I spent a lot of time being stymied by why matrix and vector sizes were wrong and why x’ A x worked. Or that the dot product was x’x (in undergrad it was x.x). It sounds like I lacked preparation but the reality was no one told me these things in undergrad. (I should also note that I was not a math major; the engineering curriculum didn’t expose me much to advanced math notation. Math majors will probably have a different experience.)