Textbooks are boring (tried using Genki for a few months learnt absolutely nothing, good job I didn't pay for it). My suggestion, go the AJATT way and those manga you have will be very usefull. In my experience once, it doesn't take long atall untill you can read pretty much anything if you use a dictionary (Including those Soul Eater manga).

All I did:
Learnt ひらがな、カタカナ.
Learnt all the kanji in "remembering the kanji" (If you don't want to buy, I'm sure you can find a scanned version somewhere *wink wink*) (Don't make flash cards for this like heisig suggests, it's far too cumbersome, use an SRS like anki, or Remember and review kanji flashcards online with James Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji")
Added sentences to an SRS (I used Anki) from Tae Kim's Japanese guide to Japanese grammar

After this If I used a dictionary I could get an understanding of pretty much any manga I had, any website...

Then after that you can add sentences from you manga or whatever...:vsign:

Can someone tell me how AJATT works? I goto the website and its more like a blog. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong.

This is how I do it:
Learn ひらがな(hiragana)、カタカナ(katakana) (AJATT blog says to do this after kanji, but I needed it for motivation)

Now learn ALL kanji in Heisigs book, "remembering the kanji". The easiest way to do this is to use the site: Remember and review kanji flashcards online with James Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" . You might find buying the book helpful (for stroke order and such), you can find a free sample somewhere (forgot where), or you can "aquire" the full book from elsewhere if you want. Try to do this step as quick as you can, don't learn anything else, just concentrate on getting it done, since after you're finished it makes everything a lot easier and faster. Also don't worry about the readings of the kanji, you can learn them later from context, which is much more fun.

Now at this point you will know ひらがな(hiragana)、カタカナ(katakana) and 漢字（かんじ）(kanji). Know you need some grammer.

Using an SRS like anki get your favourite grammer book/resource and add sentences of the grammer points. I used Tae Kim's Japanese guide to Japanese grammar (Which is nice and free =D)

If you don't know what to put on your cards heres a basic template on how I would do it:

Question Side:
アリスは食べる。

Answer Side：
食べる　＝　た・べる　＝　To eat

When I do my daily reviews I write out the sentence and say the sentence aloud.

After adding sentences from all the sections of that guide, I had a good enough grasp of the grammer to be able to get sentences from manga, games, blogs, whatever. (I'm playing Final Fantasy 7 in Japanese at the moment) Just look up the words you don't know, understand the sentence and add the sentence to you SRS. If you still can't understand when you've looked up the words, then skip it, eventually you'll be able to understand it.

When putting in your sentences, don't translate them. You want Japanese to be Japanese and English to be English.

Also try to have something Japanese playing in the background all the time. Be it anime, doramas, Tv, radio, whatever. This will help your listening, and your pronunctiation. You can download japanese shows with bittorrent, share, winny, perfect dark, or you can stream live japanese tv with a program called KeyholeTv. Just play them in the background.

I'm not very good at explaining, most of it you just figure out as you go along.

If you have any questions about AJATT, kanji.koohii.com forums are very useful.

AJATT is basically a blog with a bunch of suggestions of how to learn Japanese. It includes such wonderful and easy-to-do methods such as:

1)Use Remembering the kanji.
2)Throw away every single thing you own in English (essentially all of your belongings; movies, books, games, etc.) or sell them.
3)Purchase all new things that are only in Japanese.
4)Pretend you are a Japanese person.
5)Use a Japanese only dictionary to look up Japanese words you don't know in Japanese.
6)Read Japanese books and write 10,000 sentences in Japanese each day.
7)Don't have a life
8)???
9)Japanese fluency obtained.

Manga is a great learning tool and will help you learn a lot of commonly spoke language. It is actually much better to study that than old out of date study materials. The one disadvantage is that you don't get listening/speaking practice.

I think the problem here will be actually finding out what the grammar points are. Even if you're successful in translating whats written, would you know where to put all the は、が、で、と、に...(and so on). Best bet is probably going to be a textbook, pen & paper. Read, write, and repeat.

Just translating manga will probably make you sound quite funny if you attempted to use that kind of grammar in real conversation, since their forms are mostly dictionary & conversational (since its simulating conversation in written form.)

Japan?
 

Then again going to Japan for like 6 months or more would do the trick, you would learn more than you ever did here reading books or what not. Though that a bit more on the extreme end and costly like nothing you ever heard of.

Err, that is real conversation - written out. Not "simulating" it. You`ll sound quite a bit more natural using grammar used in manga (unless you`ve learned it from a character with a very unique/unnatural speaking style) than the stiff forms presented in most textbooks.

My mistake, what I meant was that most of the mangas Ive read (not very many) tend to lack the ます／です form. I know its an easy converstion to change to, but for beginners it may be confusing.

I agree that it might be difficult for a textbook learner to understand... But I`d say that most Japanese is spoken without ます/です.

I am always annoyed by forms lacking ます being referred to as "dictionary forms"... As if they`re only used in reference and not real life.