How to learn a language (English)

Speaking in English and Japanese with AlohaAloha

My friend says she wants to learn Chinese. She said the most important thing in language learning is vocabulary. Therefore she plans to learn vocabulary before getting into sentence structure, she said. I said that's a good idea, because I am always having to look up nouns, verbs and adjectives when writing these journals in Japanese, and it becomes hard. I said when you are an elementary school student you just look and point at images and learn words that way, don't you? My friend said that was true.