The Japanese language is spoken by at least 120 million people, mostly in Japan. Since the archipelago is generally far from most of the other countries, you might not afford it to travel there and study the language in Japan. Furthermore even if you go there for a couple weeks, I doubt that your language skills will improve significantly. This is because in the initial period you will face completely different problems, and you won’t really have time to study.
As such I recommend you to start learning Japanese at home. The first steps are mastering the katakana and hiragana alphabets for sure. This can be carried out in a couple of days and loosely speaking we can say that you can read in Japanese. This is true in a sense that the whole language can be written using these alphabets, but unfortunately they don’t do it in practice. In order to make the writing more clear, they use Chinese characters ( jap.: kanji, 漢字、かんじ ). Thus if you are done with the hiraganas and katakanas, you can start learning the kanjis. I suppose you don’t really need to pay anything for that ( private teacher, school, etc. ), and if you browse my site for a bit you can find all the necessary materials for that. In case you enroll a Japanese language course before you studies these things you will waste a lot of money, time and effort.
Free of charge in Japanese ( 無料ーむりょうーmuryou )
As for kanjis, I would recommend you to start learning the most frequent ones, then learn something like 10 new every day. Don’t forget to review them and practice the stroke orders. As soon as you have mastered approximately one thousand, you can buy an exercise book or try to solve one of my tests. In addition, you can acquire a basic knowledge by just watching some of my teaching videos on YouTube for free. You will be able to make a short self-introduction, use some verbs, nouns and adverbs.
Cash in Japanese ( 現金ーげんきんーgenkin )
And now comes the tough part, namely how to improve your Japanese and how to make conversations. There are several methods, such as finding a language partner ( a Japanese person, who will teach you Japanese and you have to teach him / her your native language), there are several websites out there, which offer such services. Japanese people are usually very happy to teach their mother tongue and if they have the opportunity to talk to a non-Japanese. Note that speaking English, is a huge plus for them. If you are lost, or have some kind of question, feel free to ask me. I currently live in Japan and I do speak Japanese everyday. Unfortunately your way of learning will not really change. I could say kanji, kanji and kanji, my personal experience is that even your whole life is not enough to know them all.