@farah I don't think there's a "right" way to study a language, you just need to find a method that fits you the most. It's dependent on many factors (like how much time do you spend learning it) so it's oftenly personal. Also it's good to set goals. What exactly do you want to learn? What is more important and what is less important for you? It might help so that you don't study everything at once, with organising the material, finding out the better method etc.

@hopeleft That’s a good point. I guess never quite figured out my end goal. Now that I think about it, I’d like to be able to understand spoken Japanese. I wonder how I should go about it

@farah have you tried watching stuff in Japanese? Watching/listening to media, especially something you like, in the language with subtitles on/lyrics displayed works for some. It's fun and shouldn't be forced, and I've heard that what's important while studying is the element of deduction, finding out the answer yourself. Look up the meanings of words, phrases, grammatical constructions etc. and try conjecturing the meaning. The context and a dictionary might help figuring it out.