You first understand and only afterwards encode your understanding in cards. It's in reviewing the cards that you put the understanding into your long-term memory (or possibly reveal gaps in your knowledge, in which case you revise your understanding).
direct translation: what has this with the matter to do?
meaning: what does this have to do with it?
Where does understanding come in? I can imagine what understanding mean for mathematics, science, etc. but for language, I'm having difficulty figuring it out.
so the understanding took far less time than remembering. I could read a whole grammar book 10 times, but if I don't remember any of the words, then I'll never be able to write/say something.
having all the words on the tip of my tongue is no good for communication.
But it's possible that we have conflicting ideas of what recall/understanding means.