What I’ve found to be helpful is to not learn the words first, but rather learn the sentence formation, and find parallels in your own language. Understanding sentence structure would really help in learning the language, and you can always substitute unknown words with English until you learn them. See how a sentence in your language is translated to that language, and see how the structure is different. Building parallels like this for different types of sentences would really help you learn the language better.
That sounds really interesting! Thanks for that link.