My homeschooled DD8 didn't want to learn multiplication tables, but I nudged her into compliance by quickly demonstrating a 3-digit x 2-digit problem, narrating as I went, and then closing with, "In order to do THIS, you need to first learn THAT."
A few months later, she's doing multi-digit multiplication, long division, and adding/subtracting fractions with different denominators... and loving it. She declares math to be her favorite subject. We pulled her out of 2nd grade and skipped her to 3rd, but now her math abilities appear to be running ahead of the 4th graders at her old school.
Multiplication memorization is the key that unlocked all of this. It may have been a chore to do the memorization, but it made everything that came after far less so.
