I don't know if I use that to learn the language itself, but also, different people have different learning styles. What I personally do to learn new languages is write some sort of program that I know well. So for me, that's text adventure games. When I'm trying to learn a new language, I go and make a very simple one. This helps because you're not learning a new domain
and a new language at the same time.
But along the whole "break it" idea... I don't know if you're an IDE person or a text editor die-hard, but I've found that rust-analyzer helps a ton. I'm historically a "vim with no plugins" kind of guy, but I'm using VS: Code with the vim keybindings now, and even if I'm not changing some code and getting feedback from the compiler itself, using rust-analyzer to go "hey what's this type here? Where's it defined, let's go take a look" has helped a ton.
That said, types help and poking around helps, but it's not always a panacea. Today I'm working on fixing something that doesn't quite work, even though yesterday I figured out how to assemble everything I'm supposed to need from this library I'm using. "It compiles it works" is a thing people say, and while I feel that way often, it's not true all of the time, of course.
