The thing about visualizing moves when they are called out and seeing the board in your head is stuff for titled players mostly.
Otherwise I don't find the chess notation confusing. It's probably the least confusing method of notating chess moves. You say which piece moves where in the least amount of letters possible.
Once you know where all the squares are it shouldn't be that hard to understand notation.
When people start talking about "I moved the pawn to e4 and the other guy went d5," etc, then I suggest for you to look at a chess board that has notation on it. Then you know the names of the squares he or she is talking about. I hope that this helps.
Can I just ask when did this change take place and was it an official change? I've come back to chess after a break of many years so would be interested to know the reasoning behind it. Thanks.
I learned chess about 1970 and everything (books, newspaper columns, scoresheets, conversations among players) was in descriptive. A few more "modern" types kept score in algebraic. Algebraic was more common in Europe, where multiple languages made descriptive more confusing as every country had different names for the pieces. In the 1980s "Chess Informant" magazine (known by other names in other languages) became the main source of information about recent top tournaments and opening innovations. Their opening manuals were the best and most-popular worldwide. They used "figurine algebraic", using symbols that looked like the pieces instead of letters to name them. It was much more convenient for an international publication (in Yugoslavia where it was printed Serbs and Croatians had different alphabets, so words that sounded the same in both languages were spelled differently). As more and more chess players worldwide used these reference books more and more people switched to algebraic for keeping score, and all new players learned algebraic. Chessboards with the letters and numbers of the files and ranks became common, making algebraic easier for old-timers. By the 21st century algebraic was by far more common, and reprintings of classic books were re-done into algebraic. About that time FIDE made algebraic scorekeeping, mandatory in international tournaments, as the only acceptable method in all their their activities. Just last year chess.com officially dropped descriptive entirely. Many national federations still allow descriptive scorekeeping in their own tournaments to accommodate oldsters, but in another 25 years it will likely only be used by those researching old sources.
wow. okay thanks guys
The main reason it might be good to also know descriptive is so you can read old books that have not been translated to algebraic.