I respectfully disagree wrt the prioritization of vocabulary. Yes, you do need the basics covered (a few thousand words). But what I realized is that if I am listening or reading a sentence with an unknown word in it, in most cases I just figure out from the context what that unknown word means (I check it against a dictionary and 9 times out of 10 I'm close enough).

Obviously this does not work if too many words in the sentence are unknown. And I'm not saying not to learn new words. But it is far more important in my opinion to read / listen so much that you get faster and faster. Especially if you are listening to speech, where you can't pause / rewind, and if you spend too much time on one thing you just get left behind entirely. Don't know a word - just skip it / ignore it and concentrate on the whole stream.