[chryuop]

Learning how to conjugate verbs will be a piece of cake once you learn hiragana. Remember that the roman letters (or romaji how they are called in Japanese) are not part of the Japanese language or writing system. All their grammar is built thinking in hiragana, thus it is easier learning hiragana first (you will see what I mean when you will encounter the godan and ichidan verbs).
I used to write to a Japanese guy using the roman letters when I had to write things like USA or other very short foreigner things. I noticed that he never used roman letters at all, so I got used to never using roman letters when writing in Japanese at all. Now I write to him 100% hiragana...I write even numbers only with kanji (thing that I know Japanese people sometimes use our numbers or at least they do in the Toukyou newspaper).