> If you're trying to learn a language, you should learn the way children learn their first language: by speaking. Talk to people in that language constantly.

> If you're trying to learn a language, you should learn the way children learn their first language: by speaking. Talk to people in that language constantly. I agree that this is ideal, but it's also a huge synchronous time sink for the parties involved. When you're learning with flash cards, you can do it on your own time, in a more directed manner with trackable, linear improvement. In less structured environments, you don't get the breadth of vocabulary. In the beginning, you also end up asking "what does _ mean?" over and over again, or scrambling to write it down and look it up later, all while failing to grok the conversation happening around it. Vocabulary alone is a huge barrier to entry in a language and, in my opinion, worth attempting to memorize in order to tackle a language.