I mean getting familiar with the most common ones doesn't hurt, but it's not that important to like dedicate yourself to memorizing them. Just flipping thru a 字典 index often enough will get you far enough imo (I imagine your class already went through this but for self-study-ers and other people interested in learning Chinese, Chinese dictionaries are split into 字典 characters and 词典 - 词 is the most analogous to single words in English, sometimes a singular character is enough for some concepts but most word-concepts are made of two characters together (and order matters))