Sounds like I'm in the same Beginner-Intermediate boat as a lot of people. What I've found really works is first off- learn Hiragana and Katakana. They're both a lot simpler than I imagined. But it will really help with pronunciation if you know the actual letters (symbols?) you're trying to say. Japanese is very different than English in that there is only one correct way to pronounce each letter (consonant-vowel pair? this is a hard term to nail down.)

Also, find a Japanese friend who knows at least a fair bit of English, and talk/write to them. I regularly talk to a Japanese friend on FB in Japanese, and it really helps me learn relevant vocabulary and the correct way to phrase things. There are plenty of sites to match up pen-pal type arrangements if you don't know anyone from Japan.

Finally, have fun with it! If you can take a trip to Japan do so of course, but if not surely you can find a sushi restaurant or izakaya in town, and practice with the people there while enjoying Delicious Japanese Cuisine.

Learning both the Hiragana & Katakana is the best start...
From there u can start to learn words & kanji...
After that u should rly consider joining a Japanese course/class
to get the grammer and speaking right...
I dont think u will be able to learn that properly
without some good teachers or nativ speakers...
Just my thoughts...

Excuse my poor english :>

I'm teaching myself Japanese too. I have an app for my phone that starts with hiragana, then katakana and after that grammar and stuff since I have a while before I will be able to go to Japan. I took 4 years of Spanish in high school but didn't learn anything until I actually lived in Mexico and then while I was there I took German and Swedish and how to teach English as a foreign language(all in Spanish). I love languages and linguistics and have found reading and if possible watching TV in the language you're trying to learn are very helpful.

Yeah I'm also teaching myself of course I'm starting with pronunciation and Reading symbols first! It's alot easier for me especially since I have most of Hiragana down I can actually read alot of the words of course translating is always the problem that comes up XD.

Hi

I have studied Japanese for 1 year in college and the book we used was
A course in Modern Japanese that book has everything kanji , grammar, vocabulary, conversation, sentences, reading practice and more these books are made in Nagoya

example words, example sentences, and pronunciation. Although this one doesn?t teach the kanji origins.