I come up with the smallest viable project I can think of that requires the given knowledge, that I'm also genuinely excited about building. I then try to get started, usually fail right away for lack of understanding of the "framework" parts of the problem, and then go off in search of examples, always keeping the goal in mind of getting my small project working.

I find this is applicable to a wide variety of subjects. I absorbed math in high-school with the mindset that I wanted to write a small theorem prover, for example.