People often complain "why is this language-learning app teaching me phrases like 'the radishes are scheming' and not 'may I have the bill'? I have a vacation in this country next week!"

If you have a vacation in that country next week, google a list of tourist phrases and memorize it by rote. These tend to be non-generalizable fixed phrases of complex, even archaic grammar. If you want to learn the language – which will not happen conclusively by next week – memorably whimsical sentences like "the radishes are scheming" teach you far more about modular, generalizable information you can use to build thousands of different sentences.

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