Yes. I usually do one or several projects to learn how a new language works. The projects I do depend on the language. I hate reading books and even moreso watching videos about a specific programming language, but thats prolly just my ADSD self.

Here's a project I'd do for Swift.

1. Write a chat server / client. (this will quickly let you see how async/threads/channels works and how good the networking libs are). You can easily go further and add a GUI to see what thats like. Add Sqlite for managing contacts/settings to see how the db layer works.

2. extract things into libraries/modules/packages i.e.whatever swift calls it, to learn how their pkg and version mgmt system works.

3. As soon as you have something working push it to a server and get it running. Add a bash script to do this automatically. The goal here is to learn how to actually release and deploy using swift.

It doesnt have to be a chat app, I usually do something thats like a problem I'm currently working on, and its best if you can actually use it to solve some real world problem. It just needs to be something that has a lot of places where you can explore parts of the language i.e. db,networking,async,etc.