I'm an English speaker learning French. A really wonderful thing I did was read books in french that I knew very well in English.  For example I read all the Harry Potter books in french and also listened to them all as audio books.  This took a lot of the drudgery out of vocabulary acquisition because I already knew what was going on. So if the book was talking about "sortilèges" I didn't need to look it up because I knew it meant "spell".