Tip for remembering if a noun is male, female or neuter, visualize it as burning/being burnt/blowing up for coding female and freezing for coding male. Of course you can reverse the system if you prefer.

Also in my experience, reading text eventually is the most efficient way to learn a language, including the grammatical pecularities. If you come upon the phrase "das kalte Bier", you know that it is "das Bier".

At the beginning of learning a language, reading texts is too slow. In that phase, memorizing and practicing vocabulary or short translations (like Duolingo, which I can wholeheartedly recommend) are a good start.

In my experience, especially from learning English, it's a good idea to not look up every unknown word when reading. You quickly develop a sense of which words or grammatical concepts are important for the meaning of a sentence. If you see a new word in different contexts a few times, you may get curious enough to look it up. Or you already have a sense of its meaning.