Questions about immersion

I’ve been trying to learn Japanese as an English speaker for a bit over a year now, and have been struggling to make what feels like meaningful progress. I did the whole Duolingo thing for a while but quickly found that outside of teaching me hiragana/katakana and some basic vocab it’s not really the best to say the least. I took a class in my last semester of college which really solidified my ability to at least sound out words unless kanji got involved, but still didn’t feel like I really made real progress of any kind.

I recently came across the concept of immersion and it makes a lot of sense to me and I absolutely think it could work for me. However, I’m curious about the process of getting started in it. It seems clear to me that there has to be a base level of knowledge of vocabulary or you’re not going to be able to connect the dots on any words you don’t know, even in content made for beginners to the language. I’ve been trying some starter decks in Anki to try and help with that.

I wanted to ask those who have tried/succeeded with this about the process of getting started and what tips you may have, or other thinks like if I should be trying to do much of any listening at all right now when I don’t understand much at all.