@Anton1966 Hi Anton. Cassie here, I'm from Philippines. To answer your question, in my opinion it's always best to learn the basics first meaning start with the greetings and basic communication. Like Kamusta ka? which translates to "How are you". You may learn a lot of words separately but you putting them in a sentence or a phrase would be a bit different. Luckily though, this site will help you learn both. I suggest picking a few English sentences and trying to translate them in Tagalog would be a good start. And then when you're searching for specific kinds of words to learn here in this site, you can easily see lots of other words that you may ought to use and of course in how to say and or use them.
hope that helps.