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what I meant is a lot of people like to just cram as many as characters as possible, and that's something you need to do, but you need to see the language used in a natural way to really get a good grasp of it. of course, at the beginning, all you can do is cram characters. but youre going to reach a point where you'll start learning words that you wont know how to use. some of my favorite words in Chinese are phrases I never say in engish. ive seen my fair share of people that just cram a list of vocab and are helpless in conversation because they actually have extremely limited exposure to how the words they've learned are practically applied.
I completely agree with CA on this.
First of all, blindly memorising words and meanings without context is a much slower way to keep them in your head than learning them in context.
Second, blind memorization of words makes you more likely to make the common mistake of shoehorning the phrases, formulations and habits of your native language into that of the language you're trying to learn. The result is that at best you'll sound ridiculous and at worst incomprehensible. If you want to see how it sounds to a Chinese person when one just randomly shoehorns phrases of a Western language into Chinese, there are plenty of examples of it working the other way around. Just look at all those poorly translated signs in English I'm sure everyone has seen, many of which are so bad you can only tell what they're saying when you read the original Chinese...then laugh when you realise they just translated it word for word...
干菜类 (dried vegetables/dried vegetable sorts) is translated as "Fuck vegetables"
...since “干” (dry) can also mean "to do" or slang for "to fuck".
In a supermarket "一次性用品" is translated as "A time sex thing", since the “性” in "一次性" (disposable) can be either "type/kind/nature" or "gender/sex/sexual".
Also, for some reason, people keep translating "可乐" as "cock" instead of "coke".
Some English words may have multiple possible translations in Chinese depending on the context, while some Chinese words may have multiple meanings in English. Many words in English and in Chinese have certain phrases that accompany them. If you don't know what phrases to use a word with or how it's formulated, you'll occasionally end up making the reverse version of the mistakes I showed above.
Best way I've found to learn words is to read a text where you understand most of the vocabulary and simply look up the words you don't recognize. Focus more on reading the text over again rather than the words you didn't remember. I've been doing this recently with online newspaper articles, but any text will do.
In terms of learning to speak, I really think there is no efficient substitute for speaking it with as many people as possible. Best way for me is simple to make as many friends and acquaintances or date as many women as you can who either don't speak English or don't want to speak it.