Yeah, the vocab is where I most feel hopeless. I use an app for learning kanji and it has parts where they build into words and it just feels like I'm missing a ton of cultural context with how some of the words seem so random with the different kanji they string together. It seems more intuitive if you're starting from there, because their words end up so much more related when made up of subwords rather than English where our words do have roots but they are strewn across a bunch of different base languages and evolve individually as sounds from there.