Hi dude, welcome to the group : )
Sounds like you've got the hang of natural learning, but what you describe is not how to learn facts.
When learning facts, the teacher/author is your model and what you must model is their thought processes. The game is to think like the author, so that you understand what they are saying in context.
A good teacher/author's task is to portray their own thought processes sufficiently for others to copy.
The process is the same; you pay attention to the author's thought processes as you read their explanations, you imagine being them and think like they do, you practice approaching the subject as they would, then you make your own creative variations and your own associations.
What you are copying is still the behavior of the model, but in this case the behavior is their thought processes.
Trying to concentrate on the facts rather than the way of understanding them will not teach you very much. For example I could tell you that “it's very dangerous to Humdusk Squilloms”, and you could remember that fact really well and teach it to others too, but you haven't learned anything; you're just a parrot (most schooling works like this). Facts are pointless without context of how to think about them -how to work them out yourself from knowledge of the subject.
Best,
AR