Hi, it isn't important to be able to successfully solve problems, what is important is going from a situation of being totally lost (as we all are) to being slightly less totally lost. There isn't a unique way of doing that, which is why there are nearly disjoint areas of math. Human camraderie can go a long ways towards a feeling "this makes sense" starting from where you look at a solution and even if you understand why one line implies the next, it just seems meaningless and there'd be no reason to remember it. If you're talking to someone and don't understand something, don't be afraid to keep insisting that it doesn't make sense to you, and trying to describe what doesn't make sense. That itself is the main skill. Just to give one example from my past, if someone said, "The distance from 0 to 1 is 1" I'd be worrying, one what? One inch? One foot? one mile? Another example, someone would say
1 2 3
( )
3 2 1
denotes "replacing" 1 by 3. But does that mean I have a row of 3 coins and where a coin had the number "1" written on it, I erase that and write "3"? Or does it mean I pick up the coin that has the "1" written on it and place it in the 'location' where the coin with "3" written on it had been? And in that case what is a "location" and why isn't the "location" encoded anywhere in the notation?