You're right! The book does not address the second difficulty at all. I agree that vocabulary is important, and reading a couple of paragraphs is in fact really productive (thank you for the link suggestion btw), however, in my opinion, having the gramatical understanding of the language will prove really helpful in reading. There are subtle changes in words depending on what role they fulfil in the sentence; trying to "just" memorize them without correlating it with the sentence aspects will be harder than to understand the wholeness of the process. Also, understanding how German builds much of its vocabulary leads to learning more vocabulary faster!
I generally agree. To be fair, my goal is to understand and be understood, not necessarily to express myself correctly - not at first, at least. I suppose it's similar to the way children learn?
