I have been studying japanese for two years by myself now and i still use kids web to help me out it is a really great page for those who have just started to learn japanese
Kids Web Japan
http://www.tv-tokyo.co.jp/ tv tokyo's home page is actually a great page to learn and write certain words in japanese
also a good tip try and make a dictionary japanese\english whit the words you know in japanese and then ad the english word like "sugoi" means incredible and so on, this way you can keep track of how many words you know and practice whit them in a dialogue
another tip is that you can use an old\new note book print out the katakana and hiragana chart paste it inside the notebook and then you start to write sentences in japanese first romaji then you try and write the same sentence but now you write in katakana and then you can try and write it in hiragana
these are some of my study methods i came up whit when i started to learn japanese i really hope i helped you some what
