The absolute first step for learning japanese would be to learn to read hiragana (and katakana). Using Latin letters for Japanese will do more harm than anything else. It obfuscates the pronunciation and you will never ever actually communicate in Japanese with Japanese people with Latin letters. After that (or in parallel), you need to get a grip on how the language looks and sounds. Learn the basics of how to build a sentence. How to talk about state of being, the simplest way to express verbs and so on. I recommend Tae Kim's guide for this (it's easy to find on Google). It's how I got started. It starts from the ground up and covers things logically and exhaustively. It also gets you started on kanji straightaway, which might not be THE most important thing if you just want to learn to have simple conversations, but if you have any ambition at all in learning the language for real, you WILL need to tackle kanji, so the sooner the better. On top of that, yeah, you need to jam in words, words and more words. Getting the basics of grammar is the essential foundation, but it won't do you any good if you don't have any building blocks afterwards. I recommend an SRS (e.g. Anki) for practicing vocab. You'll need to know at least hiragana in order to use most Anki decks (although you can and probably should use Anki to learn hiragana itself. My last tip is to immerse yourself in the language as much as you can. Listen to it all the time, even if you don't understand anything. You must get used to the sounds and start to be able to pick out words, even if you don't know what they mean. When you start out, everything will just sound like random gibberish. The only solution is to listen to Japanese a lot! Finally, good luck to you, I hope you can reach your goal :)