For a large part you are correct, and it's the expected order.

Just as a child first learns words before sentences, and at primary school you learn mostly only writing.

At a later age, you learn about higher order structures, such as paragraphs, sections, order between sections and chapters, consistency of style, order of arguments, completeness of points of view, and so on.

This is also a logical order, there is no point in explaining how to write a reasoning or argumentation, do proper layout (like double empty line when you switch subject), if you are not comfortable writing arbitrary sentences first.

Programming languages are also languages, and you see much the same steps there.

On the other hand, the number of words is very limited, so there isn't much to learn in terms of words. Programming starts relatively early.

Programming concepts technically start as soon as you write programs that are longer than 1 statement. Example

a = 3
b = a

is different from

b = a
a = 3

(for the more advanced readers: Yes, there is the exception being the case that 'a' was already 3)

This is actually programming already. Understanding how statements work, and seeing what effect a sequence of statements has. Seeing the exception is a skill that takes much longer to develop, since you have to reverse the question. (You have to answer "for what values a and b are both sequences the same", which is a much more difficult question than "what does this code do for "a=4 and b = 1".)

Many tutorial books stay quite close to a language, and this is what you expect tbh. just like a book named "Excel 2013" won't teach you use of spreadsheets in general, or its application in financial management in a company.

For this reason it is extremely important not to just read the book, but also write code, toy with it, try things. Fail, understand why, and fix. You can do that with exercises provided by a book, but you can also invent your own programs, or extend programs that you wrote as exercise. Learning by doing is by far the best way to learn programming (that holds for many other skills too).

More game-oriented exercises, higher/lower or hang-man games are very easy to write. You'd need a while loop, assignment and expressions (a = b + 1 things) , if statement, and for higher/lower random(), but we can explain that particular item. For hang-man, you also need strings, lists, and indexing (mylist[3]).