Making the effort to learn times tables or multiplication tables is one of those things which keep coming back as being crucial for success with maths. Certainly having a rapid knowledge of tables is an enormous help and they should be learnt as sentences eg ‘4 times 6 is 24’, ‘5 times 6 is 30’ etc and not just ‘6, 12, 18, 24, 30’ etc.
I still remember rote learning times tables as a child and there is really no other way of doing it.
There are a number of pages on the site which test knowledge of tables to be found in our four rules section, under multiplication.