*inhales*

Start at katakana and hiragana.

This for katakana:

https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/

Then this for hiragana:

https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/

Using those two, you’ll memorize both in about 2-3 days each. just make sure to take hour breaks between sets and review previous sets before moving on to the next set.

At this point, you will be "おはようございます"ing with the best of them, and will overflow with joy when you realize you can read “チキン ディナー”.

Then the path splits

If you are more interested in reading japanese, you’ll wanna go for kanji next. That path splits again.

if you just want to read the meaning of kanji and don’t care for the pronunciation or listening to the language, you can take this huge shortcut by reading remembering the kanji https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921 what’s really cool about this book is they offer the first chapter for free, https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2012/12/RK-1-6th-edition-sample.pdf 294 kanji for $0! Just don’t bother learning the stroke order. We got these cool new fangled things called keyboards and they type the kanji for you!

If you want to fully learn kanji, go do https://www.wanikani.com/ The journey is long and difficult, but wanikani is your best bet for learning Kanji. An alternative resource is kanjidamage: start here: http://www.kanjidamage.com/kanji_facts and move on page by page through the dictionary: http://www.kanjidamage.com/kanji/1-one-line-radical-一 That will do you for kanji, but at some point you’l want to learn other japanese words. Try https://bunpro.jp/ which is like wanikani for grammar.

If you want to learn spoken and conversational Japanese, you are going to want to get a textbook and teach yourself like as if you paid to have a class on it, but much much cheaper. I’ve bought GENKI https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401 and Minna no Nihongo https://www.amazon.com/Nihongo-Beginner-2Books-Textbook-Vocabulary/dp/B07B2N2XSR for Minna, you need the Red book AND the Yellow book, or you will be lost.

Actually, you will be lost anyway. I really recommend GENKI of the two since minna drops you in the deep end in a bad way, and GENKI feels more like one of those classes where they teach you “good morning” as the very first thing you learn. For both the kanji and the GENKI, YOU NEED to learn your katakana and hiragana. Those two are REQUIRED for EVERYTHING. [/rant]