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Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

Repetition is the mother of learning, as the old Russian proverb states.

The point is making a phrase really get memorized.

The Pimsleur method, which relies on a progressly timed learning technique really helps commit language to long term memory. It's audio only, but I really recommend then. I believe Ankh is based on this as well.

Pimsleur really hammers the language into you until it becomes instinctive.

If you are interested in repetition, Assimil is similar.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimil

> These are some of my favorite Christmas gifts because they're the only self-teachers I know that work. In just 20 minutes a day -- if you do exactly what they tell you to with the books and accompanying recordings - - then presto! You will be talking like, roughly, an unusually cosmopolitan 3-year old.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=502158...

Then make me type it in the target language.

you can switch between using keyboard input and word banks (at least on desktop)

and you only need level 1 of something to move on to the next lesson.

Yes, that's true. But level 1 doesn't force you to write in the target language - the real value is in the last level. You can go through the level 1 of all lessons relatively quickly, but you won't be actually learning.

Thanks. I wasn't aware of the distinction between the levels as I'm running them all up to five since Japanese is so completely foreign to me.

The Japanese course seems to be hated by the reddit crowd for learning the language, but it's been very beneficial to me. At least one reason is that if I stuck to writing the language in a workbook my progress on the language would be glacial. I would physically be able to write the characters better but would know a lot less of the language.

Too much repetition is inefficient.

Perhaps you have heard Russian epic of Cinderella?

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