My advice would be to learn chinease/korean in school b/c that's much harder but then learning Japanese will be a lot more simple but I sometimes mix up my Korean and Japanese lol
best way to learn is how the symbols sound(e.x anime or something with the subtitles underneath)
But grammar and proper is very hard to learn
my best advice is Websters has a language learning CD which breaks it down and isn't as frustrating as other methods