Most beginners start by gathering resources and then freeze, because none of those resources tells you what to do first. The pile is the problem. You only need one thing in week one.

Why hiragana comes first

Hiragana is the phonetic base of the whole language. It's 46 characters, each one a single sound, with almost no exceptions to trip over. Once you can read it, you can sound out the pronunciation of nearly anything, and you can use real beginner materials, because most of them are written in kana rather than romaji.

Romaji is the trap that feels like a shortcut. Leaning on it lets you start a day sooner and then slows your reading for years, because your eyes never learn to take meaning straight from Japanese script. The learners who skip hiragana almost always come back and do it later anyway, after months of a habit they have to unlearn. Starting with it is the faster road, not the slower one.

What about kanji, grammar, and immersion

They come after, and they come easier once hiragana is automatic. You don't need any of them in your first two weeks. Trying to learn the writing system, grammar, vocabulary, and listening all at once is exactly why so many people quit. They start, they get buried, they give up for a few months, and they restart from zero. The way out of that loop is to do one small thing completely before adding the next.

I started from nothing myself, dropped into a high school in Osaka in 1997 with no Japanese at all. The thing that gave me traction was being able to read the sounds. Once hiragana was something I could see and read without thinking, everything I studied afterward had a place to land.

The order that works

First, learn to read all 46 hiragana until you don't have to pause. A couple of weeks is plenty, even at a relaxed pace. Then do katakana, which works the same way and goes faster the second time. Then pick one structured grammar resource and start learning kanji through common words. That's the whole sequence, and you only have to think about step one right now.

SimplyHiragana is a free app that drills all 46 characters until you can read them without stopping to work them out. That's the entire job for your first couple of weeks, and it's a job you can finish.

You only need to think about week one. The 46 characters, and once those are solid, the next step is obvious.