You absolutely can learn orally, what I'd question is if you can do so without active listening. Listing to anything while doing, well anything, is pretty pointless to me, I tends to not listen and not absorb anything. I can barely listen to a podcast while working out, I miss huge gaps where my brain just isn't listening.

It’s the focus that’s important. If you’re listening while doing other things, you’re not really focusing on it.

You're not actually using your brain to do much, just as OP said, sort-of badly memorizing trivia.

I'll admit fault for my remark, but I'll stand by the point I meant to express.

Part of disagreement probably stems from what type of 'learning' we're discussing. In my view, at the broadest sense that we can define 'learning', is incorporating information about our surroundings into our internalized world model. The type of learning I see most valuable personally, is the type that expands this horizon the most, or helps us think in frameworks that break down the least in different contexts.

This type of foundational building often requires deep thought, but is also often deeply rewarding if you get it right. This doesn't require reading by itself, but ruminating and neural rewiring can often be produced by it, if you consume the right content for you. I think it's important to have different experiences, many of which come from consuming different mediums, as well as doing things in real life, but a significant part of knowledge to this day has been passed down by books.

Even if we mean 'learning' to be more similar to 'gathering information', I think it can be most efficiently done by reading, or doing. I don't hold as much disagreement there, nor any judgement, but I wouldn't equate the two. Perhaps a bit pedantic, but I read 'liking learning' beyond the means by which it's achieved, and 'hating reading' reads temperamental to me.