Should I learn hiragana or katakana first?

Hiragana. It carries grammar, particles and most beginner text. Katakana can wait two or three weeks — it mostly gives you loanwords, which are easy once the first script is solid.

How long until I can read a simple story?

With twenty to thirty minutes a day, most people read short illustrated scenes with support in four to six weeks, and unsupported simple text in a few months.

Do I need a textbook?

No, but you need a sequence. Something that decides the order for you — a course or a textbook — beats assembling free resources at random in your first month.

How to Start Learning Japanese: Beginner Study Plan for Month One

A week-by-week plan for your first month of Japanese: what to learn first, what to skip, and how much time it actually takes.

Most first months of Japanese die the same way: three days of hiragana drills, a grammar table nobody asked for, and then nothing. Here is a month that survives contact with a normal week.

Week 1 — kana, but only half of it

Learn hiragana. Not katakana yet, not kanji, not verb forms. Hiragana is 46 basic characters and it is the script everything else is written in, so until you can sound out a line, every other resource stays closed to you.

Twenty minutes a day is enough. The mistake is trying to finish the chart before reading anything — recognition comes from use. Read a menu, a station board, a price tag, and the characters attach to something.

Week 2 — your first fifty words, in sentences

Fifty words, chosen because they appear in the sentences you are actually reading, beat five hundred from a frequency list you never meet again. Greetings, names, places, "this", "that", "is", "isn't". You want to be able to say who you are and what you want before you can conjugate anything.

Five to ten new words a day is the ceiling. Each new word generates eight to ten reviews in its first month, so twenty a day quietly becomes forty minutes of review daily — and that is the number that ends most study habits by week three.

Week 3 — particles, the part everyone dreads

は, が, を, に, で. Do not learn them as a table of rules. Learn them as the small words that tell you who did what to whom, and meet each one in five sentences before you read a single explanation. The explanation lands much harder once you have already felt the pattern.

Week 4 — katakana and your first verbs

Katakana now pays off, because loanwords are free vocabulary: コーヒー, メニュー, カメラ. Add the polite present form (〜ます) and its negative (〜ません) and you can hold a very short, very real conversation.

What to skip in month one

Kanji as a separate project. They arrive on their own, with furigana, once you are reading. Standalone kanji drilling before you have words to hang them on is wasted effort.
Pitch accent theory. Useful later, paralysing now.
Textbook chapter order. Read what you can nearly understand, not what chapter three says you should be at.

How much time this really takes

Twenty to thirty minutes a day, six days a week. That is roughly ten hours in a month, which is enough to read simple sentences aloud, recognise both kana scripts, and say a handful of sentences without translating in your head first. Anyone promising fluency in that window is selling something.

The loop that makes it stick

Read something slightly too hard, look up what stops you, save those words with the sentence they came from, and meet them again tomorrow. Everything else is decoration. The illustrated Foundations track runs exactly that loop: a drawn scene, the words it needed, a short explanation, and a few checks — about ten minutes per lesson.