I have started to teach myself Japanese through a couple of books, namely "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Conversational Japanese"(that's a complete guide for idiots, not a guide for complete idiots...I think XD). I understand the basic rules concerning Japanese grammar and sentence structure, as well as forms of conjugation (though I haven't learned them yet).

I am going to try to learn by building up a small vocabulary of basic nouns (man, woman, boy, girl, dog, cat, etc) and basic verbs (walk, jump, give, etc), then learn how to combine these to form sentences. This is similar to how my Spanish teacher taught us in high school.

After this, I will work on more situational vocabulary (police, taxi, teach, etc) and build my vocabulary up from there.

Is this a good method to use at first, or does anyone have other suggestions?