/lit/ - Literature

Convince me that this is not the best way to learn a dead/reading-only language.

I don‘t see why you‘d ever learn grammar first before you know vocabulary. Most texts will make sense anyways as a romance/germanic language speaker once you know the vocabulary. Everything else comes with reading, consistency, repetition and time.
Traditional/school and uni learning methods seem to want to teach you everything about the language before you‘ll ever see a text, withholding everything but the bare minimum.