I gave Japanese a shot during my last summer break in high school. (Thank goodness for Z-Library!) Though it only lasted for little over a month 'cause I was an unmotivated teen even though I consume a lot of Japanese media. Dang, I could've been reading untranslated visual novels by now if I stuck with it. Oh well. Hiragana and katakana were easy and you can learn 'em in about a week or two. Make sure to learn how to write them on paper so you won't end up like those guys online who gripe about mixing up シ and ツ or the like.
Now I'm a dumb zoomer who needs pictures next to the big boy words, so I learned some grammar with
Japanese the Manga Way by Wayne P. Lammers, which despite the kitschy name, was a surprisingly solid book. The author was an editor for a magazine in the 90's called
Mangajin and the book is somewhat of a compilation of the magazine's contents.
I also watched some
Cure Dolly videos for help with grammar. Some Googling led me to a
fanmade transcript of all their videos.
As for kanji, I used the
Kodansha Kanji Learners Course by Andrew Scott Conning. I liked it better than the oft-recommended
Remembering the Kanji 'cause it gave pronunciations and vocabulary with the kanji in context, showed similar-looking kanji at the corner, and provided mnemonics for every kanji, which RTK stops doing partway through. I know there are Anki flashcards with KKLC kanji floating around. Even though I tried learning kanji for like, two weeks, I could still remember them years later thanks to this book.
