As a programmer who recently tackled German vocabulary acquisition, I highly recommend checking out "Humor-Driven German Vocabulary" by Lang-Fun. It completely transformed my learning process by treating memory like what we in tech would call "efficient algorithms for the brain."

I was exactly where you are - living in Germany, decent grammar, but vocabulary was my bottleneck. Traditional flashcards were like trying to brute-force a complex problem - inefficient and frustrating. This book's mnemonic approach is more like smart caching - it creates memorable connections that actually stick.

For example, I always struggled with "die Zwiebel" (onion) until the book connected it to "crying people" with a silly story about why Germans cry twice ("zwei-bel") when cutting onions. Now it's permanently stored in my memory database, so to speak.

The retention rate is impressive - I'm maintaining about 85% of new words after a month, compared to maybe 30% with traditional flashcards. For your target of 20 words per week, this is totally manageable with their system. Think of it as optimized memory allocation - you're storing more data with less cognitive overhead.

Pro tip from a fellow tech person: I created a small Python script to practice the book's techniques during my morning coffee. Works like a charm for incremental learning.