I for one, like how Valda uses her accent marks
On Topic:
I think the best method is just to throw russian experiences at you as much as you can, watching tv, reading books, movies, music, talk with russians if you can, and so on.
It might seem troublesome and boring at the beginning, but when the language starts making some sense and you start actually understand stuff, it's a great feeling. It will also help with pronounciation a lot.
Learning words by just steamrolling through a dictionary or something, sounds both timeconsuming and boring. The grammar is also more important than learning words, it's better to know how a word is used, than what the meaning of the word is.
For example (a bad one, to show a point): мне купи молоко. Knowing the words in this sentence will not help you a bit if you dont know any grammar.
If you know how words are conjugated and used in sentences, it will be much easier to guess what someone means, even if you dont know what some words are meaning.
I'm not saying learning a basic vocabulary is a bad thing, I'm saying that learning 10000 or more words through a dictionary is probably a waste of time, there are other aspects that are more important to focus on, the words will come by themselves when learning a language.
In short, getting exposed to the language as much as possible, while studying grammar on the side is how I think is the best way to learn a language.
But we all got our different styles of learning, some people like reading grammar books, some people learn best from real experiences and some people like doing both for the best results.
It doesnt exist one way of learning that will be the best way for all students at the same time.