Starting Out

The Very Basics

Even starting will be impossible for anyone, if they do not have a mastery of Hiragana. This is partly because Japanese grammar in itself relies heavily on Hiragana for near-everything. Many times, books and other media will explain how a Kanji is meant to be read by annotating it with Hiragana (this specific version is called "Furigana" but it is functionally equivalent, as in they are still Hiragana characters). And of course, the entire phonetic basis of the language is viewed through the lens of Hiragana. It is of vital importance therefore that one learns them sooner rather than later.

Learning Hiragana

There are a lot of opinions about how one should learn Hiragana. There are even books

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Heisig's "Remembering the Kana" can be very effective.

on the subject. In my opinion, it won't take one that long to learn them well enough even though some look very similar to warrant thinking too much about this. Simply reviewing them daily for a few weeks, writing them down and focusing on the ones that look very similar (i.e. ね and れ) will get you through it. You will come across them so often that it will be near-impossible to forget any, much like you can recognize all the individual letters in this text. The following table (read top to bottom, right to left, which is the Japanese way of doing things) lists all of them and their respective "stroke order", more simply the order in which you are to draw the lines to write each one down. Feel free to ignore "wi" and "we", as they are now obsolete.

Learning Katakana

While you're at it, you might as well learn the Katakana. In modern Japanese, Katakana get a lot of usage, and therefore you will run into them very often as well. What worked for me was writing the Hiragana and Katakana for each phonetic unit back to back so that the association would stick (i.e. writing あ and then ア). Yes the Hiragana and its respective Katakana generally look very dissimilar. Yes, most Katakana look very similar to each other. It is what it is. Much like Hiragana, you can safely ignore "wi" and "we". "wo" will ever only be used as a particle, and even then very rarely (its Hiragana version is what is used in 99.99% of cases), so you can safely ignore that as well.