Agreed that reading with readily-available translations is the most important method of learning, but with technology we can do better than the interlinear texts this article describes, which seems to just be foreign texts where each word has an English translation on top. I see several limitations of this approach:

- The English is hard to not see, so it's too easy to accidentally cheat and avoid practicing active recall.

- Word-for-word translations aren't effective when your current language and target language are sufficiently different.

If you're willing to read on a screen, we can instead have only the foreign text visible by default, but have translations (both word-for-word and sentence-for-sentence) readily available on click or hover. Du Chinese (no relation, just a fan) does this really well for Chinese, and I'm sure there's equivalent tools for other languages.

Still, any American-born Chinese knows that being able to understand a language doesn't mean you can speak it yourself. Du Chinese is great for reading/listening practice but I couldn't find any counterpart for writing/speaking practice. So I'm working on my own counterpart that works sort of like Du Chinese but in reverse:

- Start by showing you English sentences, of progressively increasing complexity

- Click a sentence to reveal its Chinese translation

- Hover over any word of the translation to get the word's definition and etymology

- Along with the translation, a full grammar explanation

I haven't released this side project yet but I've been using it myself, and I feel like this combined with reading practice is close to optimal learning efficiency.