Lafiel on 26 February 2014
well, the very first step should be to learn Hiragana and Katakana, those are syllabary the japanese use (Katakana only for english/foreign words, to be "cool" or for phonetics)
these always have the same reading and no additional meaning
learning these should only take you about a day
the hard part is learning the Kanji, which are used for the majority of words, especially for complex words and to start those you probably need to learn the Kanji radicals (the parts which make up a Kanji), as they are the key to discern the many similar looking Kanji
additional Kanji can have many different situational readings and several different meanings
