Learning Japanese is a great hobby to pick up. Like you are, learning the different alphabets is the first thing you should do. Learn hiragana and katakana, although you don't really have to worry about katakana that much because it's mostly used for foreign words. Kanji is probably the most difficult part of the language, at least for me, and will take time. I still suck at kanji and it's the part of the language that I'm worst at by far. I first started learning Japanese 6 years(2010) ago when I was a freshmen in high school. I actually started learning Japanese maybe about half a year after I first started watching anime, which was 6 years ago(not like DBZ and stuff). I noticed that I spent a lot of my free time watching anime, listening to Japanese songs and stuff like that, so I thought if I spent so much of my free time entertaining myself with Japanese stuff, why not learn the language?

I am self-taught and never had any formal education on the language. I might take a Japanese class for fun in like my last year of university of something, we'll see. I took a very casual and informal approach towards learning the language. In the beginning, I would watch anime and try my best to recognize common phrases that were being said and would look phrases up on google or in the dictionary. I inferred the meaning of conjugations and various grammar through watching anime, but I still often googled things to confirm whether my inferences were correct or not. Everything I would watch and listen to, I would try my best to recognize what they were saying and google things whenever I felt curiosity and had doubts in my interpretations. About 3(2013) years later I got into visual novels, but I only read English translated ones at first. About half a year later I attempted to read non-translated visual novels in Japanese while using a program called Visual Novel Reader, which I used solely for easily looking up kanji and some phrases. My reading speed was really bad, and it still is kinda bad, but I still read some visual novels and felt like my kanji along with my vocabulary increased overtime as a result.

For the next few years my hobby of learning Japanese was pretty casual. I would listen to dialogue in anime and understand how it worked, but I didn't put in as much effort compared to when I first started as I had a much higher understanding of the language. I would continue to read visual novels, although sometimes I would go on a hiatus. Sometimes I would read for hours, sometimes I would read for an hour or so each day, and sometimes I would go on like a 3 month hiatus of not reading visual novels. I also translated a few songs, but not too many.

Then I discovered Re:Zero and really fucking fell in love with the series and for a particular character(you can guess who!). This anime and character really motivated me to putting more effort into my hobby of learning Japanese. I started to read the web novels a few weeks ago and am really enjoying them. I have to use a chrome extension called rikaichan to easily look up some kanji, but nonetheless it's still enjoyable for me to read. Not to mention I also consider it a pretty considerably difficult novel to read, and I think other readers could probably attend to that sentiment. I wanted to express my love for a specific character and figured I'd use the skill I casually built for the last 6 years to accomplish that, which lead to me translating 2 of the Rem scenes that a lot of people were interested in.