[steven]

This is another area where people differ.

Most people say that learning the written form of Japanese first is better and I say learning spoken first is better. That is in an ideal world though (spoken first). Unfortunately that is really hard so you might try learning a bit of written (hiragana/katakana and a few simple words/phrases). Then, get a grammar book, a dictionary, and a few books on culture or something and just immerse yourself in the language. I think this will give you a really good basis of Japanese to start writing with. I think Kanji are especially hard to tackle without an already big vocabulary. The more Japanese I know, the easier kanji get. Of course the more kanji I know the easier Japanese ends up being.

When studying kanji, I don't think it's effective to study one character at a time and that's it. I think you need to have some kind of context for them. So when you learn a kanji you might want to study it and the most common kanjis it is paired with. Pairing a kanji with other kanji will change the sound (although the meaning usually stays intact).

I was going to say don't go for the wikipedia hiragana chart... but it has the stroke orders and everything. If you're going to go out of your way to learn hiragana/katakana make sure to practice them with the correct stroke order... this will make writing kanji easier. Even though it is the computer age and you won't really have to do a ton of writing, it is definitely a memorization tool... and memorization is key for hiragana/katakana/kanji. I'd say set small goals at first and just tackle one thing at a time (so learn a bit of hiragana at a time until you've gotten it all, then move on to katakana... you could of course start from katakana too... and this is all of course if you want to start with reading and writing).