What am I missing in the Feynman technique to show true understanding?

[MatthewS]

I’ve been trying to use the Feynman technique to really understand concepts in my textbook, but I keep hitting a wall where my explanation feels like I’m just paraphrasing the definition instead of demonstrating true comprehension. It makes me wonder if I’m missing a step in my own mental model, or if the technique itself requires a deeper form of prior knowledge to work properly.

[SophiaL]

I tried it last term. I wrote a kid-friendly version and then tried to explain it aloud, but I kept just swapping in the textbook words. It felt like my brain wasn’t reorganizing the idea, just reciting it. I started sketching a tiny map of how the pieces actually fit and wrote one sentence about what each part did. That helped a little, but the gnawing sense that I’m still paraphrasing stayed.

[NathanM]

I did something concrete: I pick a single problem, explain the solution step by step in my own words, then test each step against the underlying principle. When a step didn’t line up, I drew a quick flow chart and tried a different order. It sometimes earned me a new insight, other times I ended up with a detour and had to abandon that path.

[Jerry_R]

Maybe the real bottleneck isn’t the method but the material. I spot myself stuck on the vocabulary or the naming, not the idea itself. It might be that the book assumes things and you have to fill in gaps that the text glosses over. Is this the real problem, or is it something I’m missing about the concept itself?

[Addison41]

There was a moment I wandered off topic: I started thinking about why the method feels slow, then came back and realized I was chasing perfect explanations instead of usable intuition. It’s messy, but maybe the trick is to keep revisiting the core idea from different angles and not expect a clean, finished paragraph on day one.