A Level Organic Chemistry.

Hi. So can anyone tell me what's the best way of studying organic chemistry? I'm in Year 13, but due to some reasons I missed Year 12 organic in school, an later we know the lockdown happened. So, I haven't still covered Year 12 organic, and we are soon going to start the Year 13 content at school.
So any tips on how should I manage that? What's the best way to do so?
Also, there are mixed ideas among different people. Some of them ask me to study from only book/chemguide/notes because it's more of a learning. While others say that books or notes are not important and I should rather watch some vidoes on YouTube as it's complete understanding. So what's the case?
TIA

The best way is to make as many connections between topics as possible, in order to deepen your understanding. And continuously actively recall mechanisms and conditions for them(if required). e.g you can spend 30 mins a week recalling every mechanism and conditions you have learnt so it sticks.


In terms of the practicals, ensure to draw them out and actually google videos of experiments if you’ve missed the opportunity to do them. So you can understand why each step is being done. If you’re a visual learner this will help.

As far as the making connections that I spoke about For example in AQA at AS, you learn about the elimination mechanism, then further on you learn about the dehydration of ethanol to form ethene. If you remember that this is also a form of elimination, even though it’s introduced separately, it helps to condense two topics into one big topic, and as long as u remember the general mechanism for elimination, you should also remember it for the dehydrating alcohols.

connections can also be between inorganic and organic. For example, when u study the test for halogeonalkanes, instead of just memorising the steps, understand why they’re done. At first, NaOH is added, which ties into nucleophilic substitution, as [R-X + OH] forms[ R-OH + X] the X represents the halogen in the halogenoalkane, and it has now been freed from the alkane, therefore u can now normally test for halogens as described in the inorganic part of chemistry.

There’s many connections in chemistry to be made that allows u to stop memorising, and start understanding more. Also, everyone’s best method of revising varies, but I say if you find u don’t understand some parts of the book, use google and YouTube to fill those gaps. You don’t have to stick to one source.

Hope this helps!

Thank you! That was really helpful.
Do you think it's doable right now along with everything of Year 13? I mean how would you recommend me doing this along with year 13, without neglecting either of them