Am I the only one who feels like understanding something and solving it are two different skills?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'll watch a lecture, read through an example, or follow someone's explanation and feel like I understand everything perfectly. Then I try a problem on my own and suddenly realize I don't know it nearly as well as I thought.

What's strange is that everything seems obvious when someone else is walking you through it. But when you're sitting in front of a blank page and have to figure out the next step yourself, it feels completely different. Recently I was using a study tool on -- and noticed something interesting. Instead of immediately showing me the solution, it presented a game theory matrix and asked me to identify the Nash equilibrium first.

I sat there for a few minutes, made my choice, and got it wrong. But I actually felt like I learned more from that mistake than I would have if I'd seen the correct answer right away. Once I compared my reasoning with the explanation, it became much easier to understand where I had gone wrong.

The same thing happened with a parabola sketching question. Having to commit to an answer before getting feedback made me pay much closer attention to my own thinking. It's made me wonder if a lot of studying is really just becoming familiar with information rather than learning how to use it. Does anyone else feel this way?

What study methods helped you move from I understand it when someone explains it to I can solve it myself?