Here in Russia we have a lot of books adopted by Ilya Frank's method. It meens that near foreign text is translation. And so phrase by phrase. As the result you don't need to use a dictionary and see the professional translation. And so step by step you remember the words that used often. I think that foreign anecdotes are very usefull because their language is very natural. But it's more usefull to read every anecdote many times and then to try to translate them back.