My Japanese self-education has been disorganized and spotty lol (thanks ADHD).

Before I started going "I should learn Japanese" in earnest i had probably watched anime for like five years. This helped a bit but English subtitles can be a crutch that prevent you from really diving into learning. Looking stuff you hear up to see what it actually means helps, but full immersion helps more (more on that later). Learning the language as spoken also helps with learning the alphabet.

I started what I'd call actual "study" with duolingo. Duolingo was actually pretty great for helping with the basics! There came a point though where I felt like I was starting to hit a wall, and something about the app/site just wasn't doing it for me anymore. Supplementing Duolingo with other resources gave me a bit more mileage (I'd highly recommend "All About Particles" by Naoko Chino as a reference), but yeah eventually I stopped using it.

Now, I've started a multi-pronged approach focused on immersion. I'm finding it really effective. I guess if it works for a baby it can work for an adult, albeit slower haha.

I'm starting with watching anime or shows I'm familiar with without English subtitles. The point isn't trying to understand everything, but to focus on what you can and pause and look things up when I'm really curious about something. Slice-of-life stuff is particularly good because it contains the most "normal" talking aside from the stuff like anime girls yelling "eeeeeeh!?!?" An added benefit of this approach is it helps a fair bit with making sure your accent is good.

Daily, I'm using the popular Tango N5 (and some day N4) flash cards in Anki. Anki superb free flash card program.

I'm also starting to play games I'm familiar with in japanese. Right now I'm playing Earthbound and Dragon Quest V. Earthbound is actually pretty nice because it contains almost no Kanji. Itoi designed the game so his daughter could play it. For the alphabets I have printouts of hiragana and katakana when I forget any characters. I also keep a text file of notes for each game in the same folder I put the (100% legally acquired) ROM of the game in. This usually includes a table of translated menus in both the english and japanese, and unfmailiar kanji I come across. Tabs are very helpful in this. This is also good practice for using the japanese ime.

The games are very slow going. I've barely gotten through the intro in either, but it still feels very enriching. I also speak pretty much every word aloud as I'm reading it. This helps reinforce both speaking accent and alphabet familiarity for me.

To figure out unfamiliar kanji, I use a OCR screen capture program called "Text Grabber." It's $3.00 on the windows store and absolutely worth the price. You need to make sure you're set to the japanese IME in windows before capturing though. For Kanji that it can't read (no OCR is perfect), jisho.org has a great find-by-radicals tool. And a good find-by-drawing tool. And is just a good dictionary in general.

I'll also start digging into a visual novel at some point, but none have really grabbed my attention.

Anyway that's about where I'm at now. Good luck if you decide to start diving in!