Especially in a language where none of the words seem to resamle anything from my previous languages.

It's challenging, but if you can get a handle on the etymology of the language you're studying, that may help. I'm learning Chinese and the characters got a lot less intimidating once I learned about the radicals. Basically there are smaller characters embedded within all but the most simple characters, and often the character is telling some kind of story that uses all of the radicals to illustrate the meaning of the character.

For example 看 means "look", which seems pretty nonsensical. But then if you know that 手 means "hand" and 目 means "eye", then you can see that the "look" character is made up of the hand character over top of the eye character, like someone shielding their eyes from the sun as they look at something. And the hand and eye characters both look a bit more like the things they represent.

Similarly, if one was learning English, it may behoove them to learn a little bit about Latin and Greek roots, since a lot of our vocabulary comes from those. Maybe even read about some of the most common PIE roots. Once you learn about PIE roots you can start noticing them in all kinds of places in our language.