Doing the same beginner exercises in new language environments seems excellent practice to me. Yeah, you know (say) tokenizing or regexps backwards and forward

Doing the same beginner exercises in new language environments seems excellent practice to me. Yeah, you know (say) tokenizing or regexps backwards and forwards: what better topic to tinker with, to focus on learning how new-language works? Not to say that exercises emphasizing the intentions or strengths of a language are bad; but precisely those boring repetitive exercises will be the common.. say "conversational mastery" of the language.