Flashcards are not enough to make a linguist, however I doubt that you would hire a developer who said that they didn't need to know what parameters were necess

Flashcards are not enough to make a linguist, however I doubt that you would hire a developer who said that they didn't need to know what parameters were necessary/accepted for common functions in their language(s). While it's not enough it is certainly a requirement that there be some memorization in terms of vocabulary in order to hit the point where context starts to be informative as opposed to a crutch.