[KyleGoetz]

You should be doing these three things in parallel:

1. studying hiragana and katakana (learn in a couple days) and then kanji (over the next 2-3 years if you work hard you can have all 2000 jouyou kanji learned (do 20-25 per week and focus on the kunyomi)

2. learn vocabulary (as you learn these, your understanding of kanji onyomi will come, but you will need to review kanji, incorporating the onyomi reading(s))

3. learn grammar (start with plain->polite, then learn past tense and te-form, then conditionals, then causative, passive, causative-passive, and other things i've not mentioned, culminating in just more advanced things like んがために, the difference between に対して vs. に関して [vs. others], etc.).

4. yahtzee