My Japanese is rather limited, but taking a formal class can be helpful especially in the beginning stages. If you're lucky, you'll have a cute teacher
If you don't already know it, learn how to read and write
hiragana. That way you don't have to rely on Romanization so much. The sooner you can move away from Romanization, the better. Japanese children learn
hiragana first.
Then, if you don't already know it, you can proceed to
katakana. There are loads of loan words from English used in Japanese that are written in
katakana. Alas, they often end up sounding rather different after being altered to fit the Japanese sound system. To this day, I still get tripped up by that.
BTW, one of the amusing things about
katakana is how it appears on karaoke videos as way to guide Japanese people in singing English or other foreign language pop songs.
As for
kanji, that's much harder. Nevertheless, being able to read some basic Chinese characters can help when it comes to things like place names.