Why the first hundred words are not a beginner's exercise
They are the load-bearing part of the language, and almost nobody learns them on purpose.
Open any beginner course and the first lesson is colours, numbers, days of the week. Useful eventually. Almost none of it is frequent.
The hundred commonest words in Portuguese cover half of everything said out loud. In Spanish it is 54%, in Korean 25%, because Korean glues its grammar onto the ends of words and the ends keep changing. Every language has its own curve and you can read yours on this site.
What those hundred words buy you is not comprehension. It is the ability to hear where one sentence ends and the next begins. Before that, speech is a wall of sound. After it, you have gaps you can hang things on.
The mistake is treating them as a warm-up. They are the structure. Everything else you learn attaches to them.