I spent years as a foreign language teacher, curriculum designer and eventually language school owner. That experience has largely made me numb to these sorts of products and claims.
Learning words isn't the same thing as learning a language. Spaced repetition is exciting to people when they first learn about it, and it's great for memorizing certain types of discrete information (e.g. the capital cities of each country, the periodic table of elements, etc...) Memorizing a dictionary doesn't lead to language skill, though. At best it's a useful stockpile that will speed up your later learning efforts, but at the cost of thousands of wasted hours.
If you're determined to learn a foreign language from a heavily memorization based method, at least use an audio-lingual system that will give you decent pronunciation! The Pimsleur Approach will do that. It will beat not only words, but pronunciation and grammar into your head. It's mind-numbingly boring especially after the first one or two languages, but less so than a vocabulary memorization app.
Pimsleur isn't the most efficient way to learn a language. I find Assimil to be a much more interesting method. The audio component is required purely in the target language with no instructional content and very little repetition. So it is up to the end user to decide how much or little repetition they need. This ultimately means that the recordings contain far more vocabulary and phrases than what you'd get in the same time as Pimsleur. Though it certainly doesn't feel like your hand is being held as with Pimsleur.
The audio is used alongside a printed book that has one side of the page in your target language and the other in your native language for a direct comparison.
You still learn good pronunciation, grammar, words and phrases, but in a far less boring way than Pimsleur. Also there's the added benefit that you get some language immersion since the audio is purely in your target language.
Even still I would say that Assimil isn't enough on its own. To make the process of learning a language interesting you need to utilise a variety of tools and methods.
Assimil is also really good if you add the sentences/phrases of the dialogs and exercises to an Anki deck as you go along (flipping the card direction when you reach the "active phase"). The review gives you really high retention (and you can kill cards or the entire deck once you finish and get them to maturity).
If you want to use Assimil for a European language however, try to find the older "without toil" courses - they are so much better.
While I agree you are likely correct, I would add that this can be used to augment your language learning. If you take learning a language as a holistic experience, then there is definitely a place for memorization of vocabulary.
Anecdotally, I'm working on Spanish right now as my girlfriend speaks native Spanish. The immersion that gives me is great, but I also just need to memorize the words for "wallet" and "scissors".
I fully agree with you, but Anki (with pronunciation) got me 12k German words in 12 months with 40 minutes daily where Goethe couldn't give me a functional understanding of German whilst travelling. Grammar and the functional language comes ter with constant translation or immersion with sites and experiences like the excellent DuoLingo.
I'm determined to learn Mandarin. So far, I've spent two years in China learning it. It's not because of any social pressure, or because it helps me in my "career", or because I'm pedantic, and I graduated college years ago. Just one data point.
Learning words isn't the same thing as learning a language. Spaced repetition is exciting to people when they first learn about it, and it's great for memorizing certain types of discrete information (e.g. the capital cities of each country, the periodic table of elements, etc...) Memorizing a dictionary doesn't lead to language skill, though. At best it's a useful stockpile that will speed up your later learning efforts, but at the cost of thousands of wasted hours.
If you're determined to learn a foreign language from a heavily memorization based method, at least use an audio-lingual system that will give you decent pronunciation! The Pimsleur Approach will do that. It will beat not only words, but pronunciation and grammar into your head. It's mind-numbingly boring especially after the first one or two languages, but less so than a vocabulary memorization app.