The first advice is not to use a dictionary and translate from one language to another. This might sound weird, but I never used any dictionary. You have to understand words in their sentences and try to memorize a sentence instead of just a word.
Movies, TV, Youtube were the one I used primarily to learn a new language. Why?, because you shouldn't be too much focused on "learning" a new language, but more living it and having fun with it. Getting pen/paper and a dictionary every time you want to learn a language sounds like a big hassle. Make learning the language you want a fun part of your life.
Writing in forums/websites very helpful.
If you want to understand a language, you need to understand how people laugh in that language. Watch comedy shows, buy trash magazines and understand the pop culture.
Go to meetups/get together where you can find native speakers.
I can see reading such media to improve fluency to be sure, but I can't see how a sufficient amount of listening to foreign gibberish somehow makes it not-gibberish.
I tried this for learning Japanese while I was an anime fan in high school, and after taking classes in college I could understand every 10th word or so. I was a C student in those classes, so it's possible I just suck at Japanese. Is German easier to do this with?
Here's what else is in my bookmarks, aka what I've seen go past on here over the past few months that seemed approachably interesting:
http://www.wildml.com/2015/09/implementing-a-neural-network-... - a getting-started guide you can follow along with in IPython
https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/five/why-do-neural-netw... - just playing around, but notable
https://github.com/mbartoli/neural-animation - shows how to restyle video in manner loosely resemblant of Deep Dream
http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/ - this book is online-only but it's CC so you could legally crawl it if you wanted a local copy, I haven't rated it for my own use yet
http://nxxcxx.github.io/Neural-Network/ - a static 3D visualization you can zoom around, mostly kitsch but still kinda fun.
I recommend you go through the cream of the crop and find what suits you the most though:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=neural&sort=byPopularity&prefi...
