I've taken this approach while learning polish, which is the first language of my partner's parents. I started three years ago, and the first tactical decision I made was to take classes - not for the sake of being taught, but for the accountability that comes from having to regularly attend and do homework for a class. I also decided to not obsess over my progress or speed, and have been content taking a few years to learn what some people manage to do in six months of hard study. I figure it takes children 5-6 years to get any good, and they are effectively studying a language full time with seemingly much higher stakes (e.g. the necessity of communicating that you don't want broccoli for dinner).
I find that you need to study a lot of words rather than focusing on a few and get the meaning/spelling exactly right. If you have a loose grasp on the meaning of 200 words vs a perfect understanding of 50 words you are much more likely to be able to read a piece if text.
This is absolutely right on the money for autodidacts.
What surprises me is there are people who succeed at learning language in the classroom that work entirely opposite to this.
One thing that programmers and other technical people have in their favour when learning languages is the ability to defer deeper understanding of concepts. While taking in the overview of new languages we need to accept that we won't understand all the inner workings immediately. We do this everytime we learn new technologies on the job, developing deeper knowledge once we have some rough working knowledge. This can be really productive for languages since you can get a rough working knowledge going earlier and begin the positive feedback loop of listening, speaking and improving. I've seen a lot of really smart people struggle in languages classes because they want to fully grok a concept and really focus on it before moving on, which holds them back.