How to approach the material correctly

Kial here. Hello all.

I would like to understand how the course authors intend for students to learn Level 1 Russian. When I started, I assumed the lessons alone would suffice but found myself not recognizing different declensions of words when used in a phrase by a native speaker. I sought out other resources to understand the use of the declension in the given phrase. Is this the intent of the course authors - i.e. MemRise is an additional resource but not the sole resource?

Perhaps learning words with a limited number of declensions (just those used in a later phrase) might be more helpful in preparation when listening to native speakers.

While MemRise does teach some grammar, it doesn’t approach (yet) that used by the native speaker phrases.

An off topic question, I am wondering why the two people who teach the Cyrillic alphabet are not in video phrases?

thanks
K