Honest Question: is this at all helpful as a hack for starting on a new language? (fourhourworkweek.com)

Yes, though I find that the process takes a bit more than an hour, mostly because a native speaker isn't conveniently placed in front of you and because language books are simply not organized in this manner. It's a shame that they aren't. Instead of giving you a basic overview of the language most tend to slowly build up in a manner children learn the language which isn't all that useful (to me, at least) if you're in college or learning it for fun; you just don't have the amount of time it would take to memorize a language in that manner.