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Learn individual words or sentences? Best approach? (Polish learners) [6]
A lot depends on what your first language is, what foreign languages you know, how long you've been studying, how you've been studying etc in other words a lot of information you haven't given us.
Two methods that are very good for putting vocabulary into your longterm memory.
Do grammatical exercises by hand (and by memory). so if you're asked to turn the following sentence into the plural
Okno jest brudne.
you close the book and write out your answer by hand from memory and only move on when you can write
Okna są brudne. without any mistakes (it doesn't hurt to do the same thing with the original sentence.
The idea is to give your short term memory regular workouts with Polish words (and the changes they undergo). For that matter doing the same with simple texts (writing each sentence by hand from memory moving on from one only when you can write it correctly from memory.
You want to put words into your longterm memory but you can't do that by just wanting to, the way to do that is by using your shortterm memory a lot.
Another idea is to read things out loud, don't worry if you don't understand but 4 or 5 times a week read something out loud for 5 minutes or so. This is easy with Polish since spelling can be easily decoded.
Those are both very effective in any context for learning a foreign language.