I'm at my wits end right now and desperately need advice. Is there more to learning chemistry than brute force and memorization? I've been struggling through this intro Chemistry course at Uni for months but I feel like I've wasted so much effort learning this the wrong way. I'm just too much of an autist to retain this sort of material in the way that I've been learning it. Up until this point in my life, disciplines like Math and Physics have always been easiest for me to study because I can break them down coherently and understand them from the inside out, so I'll generally know right away if I'm doing something obviously stupid while solving a problem. So much of how I master information is dependent on intuition and rational thinking, but I've had to resort to countless hours of brute memorization. It's honestly just intro chemistry, covering little more than AP-level information.
Is there any framework at all that I can use to study this subject more coherently?
Chemical Autism
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Don't be a chemistry major, they thrive on this shit
physical chemistry has a framework, like the kinetics of reactions are pretty easy to deal with, the ideal gas law is a single equation. trends across the periodic table you can learn to reason out. (Although chemistry has this time-honored tradition of presenting mathematical models in really obtuse ways...) but shit like solubility you just have to memorize.
All intelligence is brute-forced, it becomes 'wisdom/knowledge' only upon some third-party consensus.
>math, physics
employ concepts, need to understand or else you get destroyed as you try to continue.
>chemistry
get destroyed if you try to understand because you should've spent that time memorizing.
Dumb
Switch to ChemPhys.
bump of sympathy
>Don't be a chemistry major, they thrive on this shit
>>chemistry
>get destroyed if you try to understand because you should've spent that time memorizing.
When you start taking real chemistry, there's a clear conceptual development for basically everything. This is the equivalent of judging mathematics on the basis of calc 1 ("what do you mean I have to memorize all these derivatives?")
I fucking doubt it
>I have to remember derivatives for calc 1, so all mathematics is autistic memorization
The Veeky Forums culture encourages people to realize that real math is argument and proof, not computation, but you're so eager to say all chemistry works the way your piddly intro class does without any real knowledge of what chemistry -is-
Genchem doesn't even involve that much memorization anyway. What even is there besides solubility rules that you have to learn by rote?