I'm also learning Japanese haha...
Funny enough I work for a japanese tour company in Hawaii... virtually all my co-workers and all customers speak japanese as their native langauge. So I'm in a great environment for it... also both my roomates speak japanese as a first language and very poor english, so I'm completely immersed.
I've tried learning in the past through academic classes but for me that was a really hard route because at the time I had no one around outside of class to keep practicing with.
Now that I'm learning just through immersion and practice, I am focusing only on being able to speak it, rather than learning to read/write/speak all at the same time and I find that it is less overwhelming and works for me. The alphabets always frustrated me. Hiragana and Katana are the same thing with just different looking characters (if i remember correctly). And although I never got far enough to attempt learning Kanji, I heard it's a bitch.
Although it's kind of agonizing to listen to, and its slow and time consuming, I would still highly recommend "Pimsleur" (
http://www.pimsleurapproach.com/learn-japanese/) You can get it off pirate bay like I did, or you can buy it, but it's quite expensive to purchase. They are audio lessons so you can put it on an ipod or mp3 and listen anywhere, I like it because it also focus on just speaking and omits reading/writing, I also find it's pretty effective. It teaches you words, then it uses the words in sentences, and then it kind of "talks to you" and asks you to understand and reply to the sentences/words you've learned. and each lesson builds off of everything you've learned in prior lessons so it kind of hammers in what you've learned so that you don't forget. Even if you aren't practicing using what you've learned outside of the lessons. It's a great way to build a foundation for speaking, but by all means, it will not teach you everything you need to know to speak even semi-fluently. That said, I still highly recommend it over any other methods including college classes. (although classes can be very helpful to meet others to speak/practice with who also might know fluent speakers themselves who you can meet.)
Patience and dedication are key. Be realistic about your goals as far as your own progress goes or you can easily become disappointed/discouraged.
Ganbatte Sp1n-san!!!
PS: It's practically impossible to find a decent translator online or as a phone app... they always come up with the most ridiculous translations... doesn't matter if your translating from japanese to english or from english to japanese, it will come up with laughable translations constantly that make no sense at all.
PSS: all of this is true:
I don't speak Japanese, but I have a cousin who does. He loved the Japanese culture so much he moved to Japan, lol. He majored in Japanese and teaches English in Tokyo. He told me it's one of the hardest languages for English speakers, and it takes years to be able to speak fluently. Worse, Japan is 98.5% ethnic Japanese, and they are not very socially accepting of foreigners. They aren't rude or anything, but they are just a very seclusive people. Even if you live there and speak fluent Japanese, you will always be seen as a weird exotic white guy from another continent.
However, Japanese is probably the easiest to learn out of all the Oriental languages. There is a learning curve, once you figure out the grammatical rules and syntax you will be able to learn it easily.
My cousin said the hardest part was probably learning the Japanese alphabets.
That is not a typo, the Japanese language actually has three alphabets.
Good luck. 
