> if it's so easy, how come nearly every school in the world offers some sort of foreign language curriculum yet after years of studying the given language 99.9

> if it's so easy, how come nearly every school in the world offers some sort of foreign language curriculum yet after years of studying the given language 99.9% of students will not remember anything past counting to 10 and 'how r u'-type phrases? seeing is believing but not in this case. How many of them really have the incentive to be efficient? Maybe as long as the students are learning something, that is enough. I can't imagine that a large swath of Germans are going to form a protest ten years after graduation and proclaim that "my subpar Italian ruined my life", or something like that. English has been very useful for me, but I feel like I've learned most of it from the Web, video games, movies, other pop culture ... it's hard to tell how important it was at this point, though. Most teaching is variations on "throw information at your senses until something sticks", and the input is reading, doing exercises, discussing. There's nothing about specific mnemonic techniques, just read it and hope that you recall it. In elementary school, they told us to remember 50 English words by trying to write them down and reading them, reading them and then trying to recall them, rinse and repeat. This technique is laughably inefficient compared to trying to associate the words with something, like associating things that the word sounds like or remind you of, perhaps in your own language.