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SilasBarta comments on Truly Part Of You - Less Wrong
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I make it a habit to learn as little as possible by rote, and just derive what I need when I need it. This means my knowledge is already heavily compressed, so if you start plucking out pieces of it at random, it becomes unrecoverable fairly quickly.
This is why I find learning a foreign language to be extremely difficult. There's no way to derive the word for "desk" in another language from anything other than the word itself. There's no algorithm for an English-Spanish dictionary that's significantly simpler than a huge lookup table. (There's a reason it takes babies years to learn to talk!)
I had a similar complaint, and the need to memorise a great quantity of seemingly arbitrary facts put me off learning languages and to a lesser extent history. Interestingly it seems easier to learn words from context and use for that reason, you can regenerate the knowledge from a memory of how and when it is used. I am also told that once you know multiple languages it becomes possible to infer from relations between them, which is perhaps why latin is still considered useful.
I find that it helps to think of learning a foreign language as conducting a massive chosen-plaintext attack on encrypted communications, in which you can use differential analysis and observed regularities to make educated guesses about unknown ciphertexts.