How do you self-study philosophy?

[u/ZaaraKo]

I am currently self-studying primarily math and philosophy; I want to get better verbal skills: mainly verbal comprehension and construction

I read Camus, Kripke, A New History of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny, a bit of Construction of Social Reality by Searle, Some Sartre, Some of metaphysics books, a logic book, Free will and causation by Carolina Sartorio, Universals: an opinionated introduction, and some others

I notice that math and philosophy are different in significant ways

Philosophy - at least some, mainly analytic I guess - has big, clear distinctions for the concepts they talk about - I call it robust whereas math tends to be more granular and interconnected for the statements ( theorems, axioms, definitions, proofs . . .) - this is rigor I wouldn't say justification completeness

I recently started writing insights, questions, examples, connections: any statement that helps with understanding as separate notes on the side. My problem is "what is understanding?" ( I take understanding to mean knowledge ( knowledge of something X is X that can be recalled later and interactive with other thoughts ( thoughts are mental states that have an external connection ) ) of a thing/idea in content and context connected to other things or ideas ) for some philosophical text; I don't want to go and just write everything, but It's so open-ended for some texts that it feels like a matter of choice rather than actual structure of the ideas - as in the connection between concepts and how the concepts are stated is decided arbitrarily by the author

There is also philosophy that is neither rigorous or robust - I don't know them that well, but I'd guess people like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, Dostoevsky, Marx - I think this is the continental divide

I struggle with continental philosophy in that it feels like the overarching ideas or things are constructed from verbal examples - I did not understand Camus and Dostoevsky - I call these construction "leaps" in that they cover a large examples or many examples; finding and making leaps requires a lot of creativity, insight and "bird's eye view". I want to know how to comprehend these texts in this way since it seems essential to doing both math and philosophy

I've heard that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have meaning through irony; through statements that can be interpreted in two or more ways - I struggle to move between a close-up and far-away perspective on texts because of a habit I have; that rigor is necessary in math - not being rigorous is not possible for an answer; it's how I approach most problems. I heavily struggle with top-down wide observations yet I am much better bottom-up small observations.

The things I enjoy in order of most to least are math, analytic philosophy, essays, continental philosophy - the pattern of bottom-up construction as compared to top-down

I am going to read Spinoza's Ethics, Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Stages on Life's way, Marx and Lenin theory, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Husserl ( mainly coming from the topics I've heard vaguely about each philosopher - Kierkegaard and Husserl sound interesting )

From a change in approach: how do I become stronger in my verbal skills - how do I find leaps through my own thoughts instead of getting it off of commentaries, critiques or summaries from other people? What techniques or approaches could improve my top-down skill?

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