This is debunked to some extent. Veritasium made a good video about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA

Personally I find a multi-pronged approach is necessary to really learn anything. Read it. Read it again. Visual guides are helpful. Work some examples. Make some mistakes, debug them, find the corner cases, write tests. Eventually when I've poked around the material for a while it starts to bed in.

Three months later it's forgotten, but when I learn it the next time I move a lot faster!