[Senpai]

I too am a new student to Japanese.

I've always loved Japanese Anime and Japanese Movies. I even found a few cool TV shows on usenet. I did learn some common phrases, but I didn't understand the language until I more recently started learning it.

I made myself some flash cards with Hiragana (with stroke order and direction) and simply focused on memorizing them first. I've bought a few books, but the same resources can be found online. I first book (before I began studying the alphabets) was Barron's Japanese Grammar. It has a chart of the kana in the front (without stroke order), and a decent Japanese-English vocabulary at the back with all the grammar you would need to know inbetween all displayed in romanji and english.

The one thing I do like about this book, is they show the literal translation of each part of the sentence as well as an english translation, arranged coherently.

After that, i realized I needed to learn the Kana and stop relying on Romanji. So I bought a book to learn Kana and Kanji, Tuttle's Kanji & Kana (Revised Ed.)
This book is awesome for leaning about kanji and understanding the structure, which leads to easier memorization of the characters and the radicals and how to read the kanji. It outlines full stroke order and direction of all the Kanji (1,945 kanji) and the Hiragana and Katakana Alphabets.

I also got a book of Verbs (including the root kanji and all possible conjugations). Although, I've found it helpful to memorize the rules over the list of conjugations.

Finally I came across this forum =D. I've barley had a look around and see tons of potential. This thread gave me tons of links. I love the hiragana and katakana drills website linked above. I had neglected memorizing katakana until today. I've already got it down solid.

It will take a lot of dedication. Don't expect to learn it overnight. Don't give up and practice, practice, practice.