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The understanding comes from knowing when to use that phrase compared with other phrases that might mean similar things. Idiomatic usage to some extent. If learning a language was just remembering direct phrases then machine translation would be trivial

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right so "med saken" was the new word, I understood the rest of the phrase. so it took like 4 seconds to understand. it'll take about 10-20 reviews to remember it for good.

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.

I understand the English words you are using. I’m still not convinced I understand what you are saying. In this particular case recall doesn’t seem to be the problem.

I think it's possible we're not in disagreement at all, but I'm struggling to express the issue: to me, "recall" is the task that takes all the effort, "understanding" is pretty much instant. Therefore "recall" is the bottleneck between me now and me using the word in a conversation or piece of writing.

But it's possible that we have conflicting ideas of what recall/understanding means.

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