How to make learning Japanese easier?

From someone who went through quite a lot of research to learn Japanese

I feel like these methods can be followed for learning any Language.

Again, this is just my experience.

So to get started, my go to option would be duolingo. I switch to duolingo whenever I'm feeling a little unmotivated as well. However I don't think you'll be able to learn the entire thing with Duolingo.

To start learning the basic Alphabets-Hiragana and Katakana, I would recommend Japanesepod101. You can find their videos on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wZHqOghvSs

Once you've mastered the Alphabet from there, you can move on to the cream of the language-Kanji.

To understand how kanji works- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPppVDX_GiY

You can also refer calligraphy videos to understand how Kanji is written.

This website is also pretty helpful- https://www.kanshudo.com/collections/genki

Learning Kanji also helps to improve your Vocabulary skills. To speed it up you can also Watch Anime/Drama with sub. Once you feel like you can understand some of the basic phrases and such try turning off the caption (you have the option to turn of caption in gogo4nim3.cam) See if you can relate the word with what's shown on the screen. For eg, if you see a dog on the screen and the character is talking about the dog try to identify the word that's being used for dog.
If you cannot understand anything from watching captionless anime/drama, It's useless, so make sure you can understand enough
(I would recommend slice of life animes)

You can also watch a sub/dub show a once or twice and try watching the same without the sub in Japanese. this way you'll be able to understand the Captionless stuff easier.
You can also watch Anime/drama with Japanese sub (I wouldn't recommend this for a beginner coz you'll have to read very fast)

A few websites that have Jap sub-Animemelon,

Another thing that you can do (for all my manga readers)
If you have mastered Hiragana and Katakana that is, read a translated manga side-by-side the raws.

I would recommend reading Kudomono, Shounen or Shoujo mangas for the beginners.

Kudomono- This is aimed at little kids, so the dialogue is in Hiragana/Katakana

Shounen/Shoujo- This is aimed at young boys/girls, the dialogues will be in Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. But the Kanji will also have Furigana (this is the exact same kanji but written in Hiragana/katakana,

https://bilingualmanga.com/

http://www.nippontalk.com/en

https://www.mangaz.com/

https://www.sukima.me/book/search/?free=1

So, these are a few ways you can get going.

If you want to interact with a particular language speaker 'lang8' is a good platform

Textbooks for Japanese- Genki is one of the top rated
I would also recommend the 'Japanese from zero'
A dictionary would also come in handy.

This may help you with Kanji, It helped me.

The thing about Kanji is the more Characters you learn the easier it gets. So don't get too overwhelmed with it.

This may also help-https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/ntzb7m/ive_memorized_recognizing_2200_kanji_from/

https://www.geekymatters.com/read-raw-manga/

Exercises- https://sethclydesdale.github.io/genki-study-resources/



If you need help with anything, just slide into my Dms and if it is something I can help with, I'll definitely help

Havaguday!!!