[gaugefield]

I have been self-studing alot. In fact, my first experience was the professor asked me to solve one of his final exam questions (for which he had provided his lecture notes for the course) within a few days after I asked for a internship.

The way I do it is to create exercise where I am required to fill as much of details as possible in the must explicit way. Sometimes, this is in the form of lecturing my friends for several hours. Or reproducing some computational results from computational physics (writing software and getting results correctly requires alot of details getting right). Similarly, when I studied such notes (for some of which I did not have accompanying course), I tried to fill as much of details as possible in the notes and do the exercises.

The ultimate state you want to reach is one where you can derive some results topic with enough details from scratch (without looking at the notes), like the way one can remember movie plot or something.

If you can take this process of understanding (and getting details right) very seriously + feynman technique, these can be helpful. But, you need to be really serious about learning and applying them (e.g. reproducing some results)