The best step to take first of all is to learn the basic hiragana alphabet. It's an alphabet which is not massively larger than ours, so at a fundamental level you can do this with a sheet of paper and an image search, just writing them out repeatedly on each line (if you can find something that shows you the stroke order), sounding them out, and blind memory testing yourself. A prodigy might pull that off in an evening or just casually you can have them solidly memorised in a week or two.
I don't have any great resources myself. I am in this 'Japanese & English' Discord server (invite link); I haven't followed any of the chat there in a couple of years but I remember it being generally helpful and not overtly woke, at least at surface level, having a lot of resource links as well as the bots for vocab and kanji lookup, etc. But it is Discord in the end.
Anyway with the basic alphabet memorised, you have all you need to at least read any pre-schooler level grammar and vocab lessons you find online. Most likely the first grammar point you'll encounter will be sentence structure and 'particles' - the alphabet characters used to break up sentences and denote the roles of words within them - then moving onto verbs, tenses, conjugations and whatnot. From there you can gradually build beginner vocab as you go, learn the katakana alphabet (annoying and often redundant but unavoidable) and begin to set out on memorising kanji. Kanji should be combined with vocab learning and you can't really beat the helpful sheet of A4 scribbles for it IMO, but everyone seems to be about Anki and online flashcards these days.
Without knowing any kanji, you have no chance of reading most Japanese media in general. However, stuff aimed at young kids or teens may have yomigana above the kanji (basic characters to help with reading), though it's a coinflip for stuff aimed at teens. So once you reach the point you want to challenge yourself with rando manga or other media, you can check if it's for you by scanning a few pages and making sure there are hiragana or katakana characters above all the kanji, then at least you'll know whether you have an easy lookup method.
As an extreme example of shortcutting, to give you an idea of your available range of approaches, one thing I would not recommend doing but which is theoretically possible would be to:
-learn hiragana, katakana and particles (can't skip particles)
-download a screen text hooker program and fire up some japanese titty games
-feed the game text into a translator like DeepL with the aid of the text-hooker. Normally this would not have much chance of passing for structured learning EXCEPT FOR the fact that 1) you already know particles, so you mostly know which characters are part of a vocab word and which are not and 2) the game has yomigana, so you're able to match the basic kana to the kanji and match it all to the vocab and grammar output of the translator. DeepL's not perfect but it's a lot better than Google Translate and will give you a fairly good idea, most of the time - in fact commercial Jap2English translators have been getting scolded lately for outputting DeepL-dependent work. One less lazy and retarded possibility would be to only use such a text hooker as an aid, for isolated words.
But like I say, I would not recommend that sort of sudden headfirst dive too early on. I could never get a text-hooker to work worth a damn anyway, the couple of times I tried. I look up stuff on my phone using Gboard direct stroke input and a dictionary app (about the only thing I use my smartphone for - I hear you can also look stuff up via the cam on them these days).
Historically ive heard one of the best things to do is to actually speak with Japanese speakers consistently. You actually have people you get to use it with or do you get by mainly with study?
The purpose of the question being, I wonder if someone can truly get to proper speaking form with study alone. Although I guess listening to Japanese through videos or whatever probably has most of the same effect, but actually engaging in speech must have some form of otherwise unobtainable benefit.
I learnt Japanese as part of a course with a listening and speaking element plus I spent time in Japan, so I did have those options - but they were my least favourite way of learning. Listening was always my weakest aspect of Japanese by a distance and it remains the only aspect of the language that continues to throw up difficulties for me. Learning by reading with an audio accompaniment is great, but in the early stages the problem with having just an aural source alone was than my understanding of a sentence would instantly collapse when I encountered vocab I was unfamiliar with, or else when encountering a new word which was homophonic with a word I already knew, and there are many many homophones in Japanese.
With speaking, in contrast you can just kind of babble and stick to comfortable forms and colloquialisms, just trying to express yourself as a best effort with the tools you remember - much like anyone does in their native language, really. The advantage of having both speaking and listening as an element of your learning is that you can start to actually think and formulate ideas in Japanese, which is key to getting to near-native-level communication.
You can however coach yourself in those Japanese patterns of thought without necessarily having a conversation partner. Replaying lines of dialogue that you hear in media, speaking them out loud yourself in practice, are one way (visual novels or JRPGs with a replayable text backlog are great for this). It's also a similar way to several Europeans I've heard from who've said they learnt English as a second language by listening to songs and watching media. The pitfall is you have to be careful of coming out sounding like an anime character, which will just add more cringe to the world. Don't emulate any character that screams a lot, nor anyone that acts like it's nothing personnel, nor any narrators, and certainly not females, especially if you are one.
This website has a great guide and a ton of resources to help you get started.
This video has another good breakdown on what to do. The channel itself is pretty good. I would recommend you watch his series on the Genki books if you get your hands on them (there are pdfs out there you can acquire for free).
The important thing is to make a habit out of studying, as willpower alone won't be enough for the long journey ahead. The book Atomic Habits is a good one that can give you some tips on how to build and maintain habits.
What's a good way to get into learning Japanese? I assume playing Japanese language titty games is more of an intermediate level activity.
The best step to take first of all is to learn the basic hiragana alphabet. It's an alphabet which is not massively larger than ours, so at a fundamental level you can do this with a sheet of paper and an image search, just writing them out repeatedly on each line (if you can find something that shows you the stroke order), sounding them out, and blind memory testing yourself. A prodigy might pull that off in an evening or just casually you can have them solidly memorised in a week or two.
I don't have any great resources myself. I am in this 'Japanese & English' Discord server (invite link); I haven't followed any of the chat there in a couple of years but I remember it being generally helpful and not overtly woke, at least at surface level, having a lot of resource links as well as the bots for vocab and kanji lookup, etc. But it is Discord in the end.
Anyway with the basic alphabet memorised, you have all you need to at least read any pre-schooler level grammar and vocab lessons you find online. Most likely the first grammar point you'll encounter will be sentence structure and 'particles' - the alphabet characters used to break up sentences and denote the roles of words within them - then moving onto verbs, tenses, conjugations and whatnot. From there you can gradually build beginner vocab as you go, learn the katakana alphabet (annoying and often redundant but unavoidable) and begin to set out on memorising kanji. Kanji should be combined with vocab learning and you can't really beat the helpful sheet of A4 scribbles for it IMO, but everyone seems to be about Anki and online flashcards these days.
Without knowing any kanji, you have no chance of reading most Japanese media in general. However, stuff aimed at young kids or teens may have yomigana above the kanji (basic characters to help with reading), though it's a coinflip for stuff aimed at teens. So once you reach the point you want to challenge yourself with rando manga or other media, you can check if it's for you by scanning a few pages and making sure there are hiragana or katakana characters above all the kanji, then at least you'll know whether you have an easy lookup method.
As an extreme example of shortcutting, to give you an idea of your available range of approaches, one thing I would not recommend doing but which is theoretically possible would be to:
-learn hiragana, katakana and particles (can't skip particles)
-download a screen text hooker program and fire up some japanese titty games
-feed the game text into a translator like DeepL with the aid of the text-hooker. Normally this would not have much chance of passing for structured learning EXCEPT FOR the fact that 1) you already know particles, so you mostly know which characters are part of a vocab word and which are not and 2) the game has yomigana, so you're able to match the basic kana to the kanji and match it all to the vocab and grammar output of the translator. DeepL's not perfect but it's a lot better than Google Translate and will give you a fairly good idea, most of the time - in fact commercial Jap2English translators have been getting scolded lately for outputting DeepL-dependent work. One less lazy and retarded possibility would be to only use such a text hooker as an aid, for isolated words.
But like I say, I would not recommend that sort of sudden headfirst dive too early on. I could never get a text-hooker to work worth a damn anyway, the couple of times I tried. I look up stuff on my phone using Gboard direct stroke input and a dictionary app (about the only thing I use my smartphone for - I hear you can also look stuff up via the cam on them these days).
Historically ive heard one of the best things to do is to actually speak with Japanese speakers consistently. You actually have people you get to use it with or do you get by mainly with study?
The purpose of the question being, I wonder if someone can truly get to proper speaking form with study alone. Although I guess listening to Japanese through videos or whatever probably has most of the same effect, but actually engaging in speech must have some form of otherwise unobtainable benefit.
I learnt Japanese as part of a course with a listening and speaking element plus I spent time in Japan, so I did have those options - but they were my least favourite way of learning. Listening was always my weakest aspect of Japanese by a distance and it remains the only aspect of the language that continues to throw up difficulties for me. Learning by reading with an audio accompaniment is great, but in the early stages the problem with having just an aural source alone was than my understanding of a sentence would instantly collapse when I encountered vocab I was unfamiliar with, or else when encountering a new word which was homophonic with a word I already knew, and there are many many homophones in Japanese.
With speaking, in contrast you can just kind of babble and stick to comfortable forms and colloquialisms, just trying to express yourself as a best effort with the tools you remember - much like anyone does in their native language, really. The advantage of having both speaking and listening as an element of your learning is that you can start to actually think and formulate ideas in Japanese, which is key to getting to near-native-level communication.
You can however coach yourself in those Japanese patterns of thought without necessarily having a conversation partner. Replaying lines of dialogue that you hear in media, speaking them out loud yourself in practice, are one way (visual novels or JRPGs with a replayable text backlog are great for this). It's also a similar way to several Europeans I've heard from who've said they learnt English as a second language by listening to songs and watching media. The pitfall is you have to be careful of coming out sounding like an anime character, which will just add more cringe to the world. Don't emulate any character that screams a lot, nor anyone that acts like it's nothing personnel, nor any narrators, and certainly not females, especially if you are one.
This website has a great guide and a ton of resources to help you get started.
This video has another good breakdown on what to do. The channel itself is pretty good. I would recommend you watch his series on the Genki books if you get your hands on them (there are pdfs out there you can acquire for free).
This guy is a cunt at times but some of his videos are really good.
The important thing is to make a habit out of studying, as willpower alone won't be enough for the long journey ahead. The book Atomic Habits is a good one that can give you some tips on how to build and maintain habits.
Excellent, thank you.