A realistic first month
What to do, week by week, for your first four weeks, and what to ignore.
The most common way to fail at Japanese is to start everything at once (kana, kanji, grammar, an app, a textbook, a YouTube series) and burn out inside a month. This is a narrower plan.
Week 1: hiragana only
Nothing else: no katakana, no kanji, no vocabulary. Spend twenty to thirty minutes a day writing characters by hand while saying them aloud. Handwriting matters here because it builds recall rather than mere recognition.
Week 2: katakana, and your first words
Katakana is the same sounds in new shapes, so it goes faster. Because most katakana words are borrowed from English, you can start reading real things almost immediately: menus, signage, product names.
Week 3: sentence structure
Now grammar. です, は, を, に, and the ます form. If you read Hindi, this is where the word order clicks into place quickly. Aim to build sentences rather than to memorise the rules behind them.
Week 4: numbers, and your first kanji
Numbers, time and counters: the highest-frequency material in the language. Then the number kanji, which are the easiest possible introduction because you already know what they mean.
What decides whether you continue
Frequency matters more than method or materials. Fifteen minutes every day beats three hours on Saturday, because retention depends on how often you come back to the material rather than how long you sit with it. Make the daily session small enough that you never have a reason to skip it.