>>213508367
I learned hiragana and katakana by following along with these videos, practicing writing each character, and making mnemonics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p9Il_j0zjc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6DKRgtVLGA

Then I signed up to the free JapanesePod101 beginner course and did it for a few months before my free trial ran out. I tried learning how to write each kanji I learned but eventually realized it was a waste of time and stopped. Then I started doing the Anki Core 2k/6k deck. I would also randomly watch the videos by Japanese Ammo with Misa or Kaname Naito whenever I'm bored a have a few minutes to get grammar points in my head.

Here's a useful guide worth skimming through.
https://djtguide.neocities.org/guide

As everyone else always says, Tae Kim's grammar guide is also worth skimming through.
https://www.guidetojapanese.org/grammar_guide.pdf

I started to feel like I was making the most progress when I started watching CardCaptor Sakura with Japanese subs and made my own Anki deck for sentence mining. I think this was around a year after I started studying Japanese and I could only understand like 20% of what was being said but enjoyed it. I recommend trying to mine 2-5 cards per episode on average so you expand your vocabulary but aren't constantly pausing. The only money I spent was on the first volume of the Pokemon manga which I occasionally read. I then started sentence mining a short free kusoge called Oniguisama and mined like 30 words from it. This was like 1.5 - 2 years ago and I'm now mining てにおはfeat真美. after the guy below recommended playing nukige for immersion.

https://archive.is/y4jyO

Overall, the learning methods that I felt like helped me the most were the Anki core 2k/6k and then immersion + sentence mining to make my own deck.