Stages in Learning

It seems many of you want a direct plan to follow, so let me condense my previous post into 3 stages.

1) Learning the alphabet
When you first start learning this language, hands down, the first thing you need to do is learn Hiragana and Katakana (in that order).  Many sites offer ways to learn this, but they all suggest one thing in common.  Write each one 50 times with correct stroke order. You cannot start learning the language until you know the alphabet. Of course kanji is considered part of their alphabet, but you can ignore that in this early stage.

2)Learning the grammar
After you get your kana down, you need to learn some grammar.  I recommend the Genki I and II books.  It doesn't really matter where you learn your grammar, but you have to learn it somewhere.  I would recommend a full book over a small internet guide because thick books will most likely offer a more comprehensive lesson.  Simply put, the bigger your book is, the more grammar you will learn.  Dont stop at 1 book, look through various ones.  Skim through other books to verify you learned all the grammar you can

3) Self study
Don't think you can follow guides forever.  Eventually you must learn to fly on your own.  Start at the easy stuff aimed at kids, then over the course of months, work up to young adult works.  The hardest part of learning is when you first start your self study.  Being thrown into the world of Japanese will confuse the fuck out of you at first, but you have to stick with it.  You wont understand everything you see, in fact, you will more than likely NOT understand most of the content you come across.

I first started with playing Pokemon (The GBA game) because 1) I knew the content already 2) Its aimed at kids.  Immediately I was hit with a bunch of words I didn't know.  This WILL happen to you.  Write down the entire text in a blank notepad and look up each word individually.  Try to piece what you can and guess the rest.  If the word seems common, attempt to memorize it.  Add it to your anki deck.

After pokemon, I tried reading School Rumble (manga) because I liked the anime series.  Having already seen the anime, I knew what would happen already and it helped me piece the information together.  I recommend that you read things that you already know first.

You will stay in this phase for a very long time, simply because learning another language is a never ending process.  Every now and then I learn new English words.  You may think "If it never ends, fuck, I don't want to learn Japanese anymore".  Don't think that.  When I was a little kid I was still learning English words, but I could safely say I knew English.  I could watch television shows and read books, even though there were many high level words and topics I didn't understand.  So even though I say learning is a never ending process, eventually you will reach a stage where reading/listening/speaking Japanese become 2nd nature.  Around this point most people say they "know" the language.  This is your goal in training.

For those of you in stage 3, please post what you are doing for self study as a comment.