Building Latvian vocabulary efficiently (see Latvian Vocabulary) comes down to a few specific habits that account for the language's case system without letting it slow down early progress.
Never learn a bare Latvian noun — attach its gender from the very first time you encounter it, since gender affects the case endings you'll add later. Retrofitting gender onto vocabulary you already "know" is much harder than building it in from day one.
Whatever case a word appears in when you first encounter it, look up and learn its nominative (dictionary) form as your primary reference point — this becomes the stable anchor you'll apply case endings to later.
Thematic clusters (food, travel, family) tend to appear together in real sentences, which builds more naturally usable vocabulary than a strict frequency list studied in isolation — you're more likely to actually need several food words in the same conversation than one random high-frequency word at a time.
Once a word's base form feels solid, practice it across a couple of the most common cases (nominative and accusative first) rather than learning the ending pattern abstractly before you have real vocabulary to apply it to.
See also the reference page: Latvian Vocabulary.
Always learning the noun together with its gender from the very first encounter — retrofitting gender onto vocabulary you already "know" is much harder than building it in from day one.
The nominative (dictionary) form — it becomes the stable reference point you'll apply case endings to later, regardless of which case you first encountered the word in.
Thematic grouping (food, travel, family) tends to build more naturally usable vocabulary, since related words are more likely to appear together in real conversation than isolated high-frequency words.
Once a word's base form feels solid — practice it across the most common cases (starting with nominative and accusative) rather than studying case endings abstractly before you have real words to apply them to.