I just finished Alloy of Law and had an absolute blast! But I read the Ars Arcanum excerpt at the end of my ebook and felt like my braincell was being waterboarded with all the metals and their respective uses. Throughout Era 1 I felt comfortable recognizing the metals, and Feruchemy I mostly treated as "ah, yes, Sazed is doing Sazed things with his metalminds". The concepts themselves are fine, but now especially in Era 2 I just feel like there's so many different abilities! It's very cool but I'm having trouble keeping up with all these metals, especially for Feruchemical powers.

For Miles I kinda understood that he would store health in a gold metalmind, burn it and then store the resulting burst of health in another metalmind he could tap later due to the fact that feruchemy overwrites allomancy somehow? I don't get why though.. As in why burning a metalmind gives you the Feruchemical effect rather than the Allomantic one or both at once. I guess I have to accept it as a fact lol I'm not very smart about this. And I still can't remember what most feruchemists do based on the metal haha.

I think I can still get by on description mostly, since Sanderson's writing is so clear and readable, but I kinda feel bad feeling like I can't memorize and understand all the metals that well. Funnily enough I can bet that I have not encountered all of them either, there's always another secret..

So I wanted to ask, is it okay to be a little bit confused in early Era 2? How long did it take you until these were all second nature?