I think you're hitting on something real here, that translation doesn't "scale up". You can't rely entirely on learning translations to learn a language, and in

I think you're hitting on something real here, that translation doesn't "scale up". You can't rely entirely on learning translations to learn a language, and in some ways it can really hold you back if you think of things as having a 1-1 mapping with English. Especially when dealing with languages without a common ancestor with English, like Japanese, where a lot of concepts just don't line up. For example, in Japanese there's not a direct equivalent to the word "to give". There are different words depending on the relationship between the people, and at a basic level, you always have to "give upwards" or "give downwards", with different words for each. I could see this kind of method of teaching being really useful for learning those kinds of concepts. I think learning the Japanese words directly, without getting hung up on what their English translations are, could avoid some pitfalls. I'm less sure about how useful it is for the real basic basics. But it's a cool concept none the less.