[SeoulFire]

I can offer some insight into learning an Asian language but not Japanese specifically.

The first thing I would do is learn how to read and write - do your studying of Japanese in Japanese. This seems pretty straight forward but I have met so many people with messed up pronunciation because they learned it through romanized expressions (although this may apply more to Korean than Japanese...I don't know).

Reading and writing is not difficult for the most part - this came from my friends that were in Japan for quite some time. The hardest part about Japanese is the prevalence of Kanji in the language. But as you have some familiarity with this it should not be too bad.

The first thing I did when I learned Korean was to study and memorize the symbols/sounds and start reading/writing in Korean. Do not neglect saying these sounds as you learn as the speaking/listening skills can fall behind. When you read (even basic sentences) read them aloud. If you can get your hands on some children's books it is a good way to learn basic sentence structure and grammar implicitly - but once again read them aloud as much as possible.

Japanese and Korean are pretty easy languages to read and write - I learned how to read and write Korean (very slowly mind you) in a day or two. If it were Chinese I would just say screw it and learn through romanization heh.

Good luck.

One more thing - as mentioned above start thinking about the sentences in Japanese. It will help with word order as Japanese is SOV whereas English is SVO.