[casey2]

Trying to learn a language by anything other than going through the process of constructing grammatical sentences in the language is my favorite genre of hackernews posts

This is a fine way to bring the material into your "cache" but you aren't doing the work required to learn a language: Communication!

[josefrichter]

I share your skepticism. The approach you mention seems to be not only the most efficient, but maybe actually the only one that works. This is probably more about neuroscience than personal preferences.

The approach presented in the post is not necessarily on conflict with that, but it seems like extremely laborious preparation stage. And despite expectations, learning the different alphabet is usually unnecessary until fairly late into the learning process.