To understand physics first of all you have to master concepts rather than equations. The equations are just the (so far only) adequate language to formulate physics in a concise way. Often the key to solve a physics problem is to find a clever way to write equations in a compact way. Sometimes physicists invent a whole new symbolism. One obvious example are Feynman diagrams, which are nowadays understood as very compact and intuitive to write down the equations for calculating S-matrix elements in quantum field theory. Feynman invented them in the late 1940ies, introducing them to his collegues in 1948 on the legendary Shelter Island Conference (see S. Schweber, QED and the Men who made it), in a completely intuitive way. It proved to be a great shortcut compared to the cumbersome method by Schwinger, who presented his version of QED on the same conference. To the surprise of the participants, Feynman and Schwinger agreed on their results, and shortly thereafter, Dyson showed that Feynman's diagrams can indeed be derived from perturbation theory of QED and that thus are just a clever notation for the complicated formulae Schwinger wrote down in his approach. Of coarse to do quantitative calculations you have to evaluate the Feynman diagrams and go through the cumbersome math after all (nowadays fortunately with help of computer-algebra systems), but to set up the scheme and to organize your calculation, such handy notations are the key. Also in the later development of QFT, most notably the renormalization theory the use of Feynman diagrams were again the key to success, organizing the counterterms making the final results finite to make sense of the entire formalism in a very intuitive way.
The same is true for the equations themselves. E.g., for the standard-model Lagrangian (containing the whole known properties of the fundamental particles, which are leptons, quarks, gauge, and (at least one) Higgs boson) starts in a quite short well-organized form, incorporating the very concepts behind the standard model (symmetry principles, local gauge symmetry, and all that), but to get the Feynman rules out, you need to go through some algebra, leading to very lengthy expressions, but you don't have a chance to understand anything from "mastering" these huge expressions to begin with. That's why I said, starting to learn theoretical physics, it's always important to get the concepts behind the equations first!
