A good answer to this question would take many pages, at least partially because there are so many different ways people's minds work, and so many different ideas. Let me give an answer, and possibly continue in comments if I don't have space.
1. Don't frustrate yourself by trying to pound things into your head. You're no more likely to something from short term to long term memory by writing it 25 times continuously than you are by writing it 3 - 5. Instead, for those times when you are learning new vocab and grammar patterns, get groups of words, and go through them in random writing and speaking. You may forget when you get back to your word, but don't worry. Just re-learn. Maybe repeat after 5 or 30 minutes, but don't stress when you forget - it's part of learning.
2. The next day, repeat this process in your review. When you get them committed to memory so that you hit 80% or so, move to new sets of words and new lessons. Put your old words on flash cards such as FlashQuiz (which I use) on the computer.
So that is just vocabulary and maybe some patterns. But that's only a small part of learning. Unfortunatly, I think the traditional classroom approach is the absolute WORST approach to learning a language for several reasons, not the least of which is that you mostly hear poorly spoken examples from fellow learners and that doesn't help you tune your ears, and you get critique from fellow learners most often, and that doesn't help train your muscle memory.
I think that's about as much as I can put in one message, so let me continue.