Unfortunately I was not in class the day that we did the learning activity with Japanese but I've got an idea of how I would create my own way to learn a language.
I think the concept of picture/word recognition that Rosetta Stone uses is great. Start off by taking picture of things around the house, at school, at work etc and find out what these things are called in your target language. This way every time you see the dining room table you'll be prompted automatically by yourself to try and remember what it's called in the other language. This is good for absolute beginners but if you want to move up in your skills I really don't think that Rosetta Stone's way of teaching grammar is the best.
Conjugations and grammatical rules need to be learned straight up. Use flash cards or whatever but simply by looking at a sentence over and over again in a different language is not going to teach you different cases, tenses etc. I think the best way to learn these is through writing and repetition, which should then be followed by listening and then speaking. There is no point in pushing speaking to the forefront. Most people consider speaking the most important part of learning a foreign language, and it is. However, it is also the last skill to be acquired when learning that language therefore, there is no point in focusing just on speech. In the beginning, pronunciation is important and should be practiced but if writing and listening are studied intensely, then speaking will be more natural.
This is the method that I have used to learn the languages that I know. When I sat down in my first class as a an exchange student at my high school in Germany I simply pulled out the dictionary (call me a nerd) and started reading it. I did this for about a month straight because once my vocabulary was strong enough, I was able to pick up parts of conversations and if you can get a few words from a conversation and understand body language, then you can pretty much get the gist of what's being talked about. Finally came speech, but that only came after months of writing down new words every day, memorizing them and listening to conversations. Everyone's method is different, but this is the one that works for me.
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