Order of learning Japanese?

Question:

Bottom is TL;DR, I didn't think I was going to type this much. x_x

So, I've started learning Japanese and I feel motivated to get as much knowledge of the language before Summer 2012. (Willing to spend 56 hours a week learning until then)

I've currently perfected Hiragana (Including voiced/double consonants, y vowels and long vowels) with the use of mnemonics and I'm going to be starting on Katakana later today.
(I'm not entirely sure whether I'd be capable of learning Katakana as great as Hiragana because they share the same sounds which might get confusing because they look so different for the most part and they do not resemble the mnemonics I used so I would have to create new ones or develop a way of linking them to their Hiragana equivalents :l)

Anyway, my main issue is not knowing what to do after I memorize all of Kana.
Should I start on Kanji/sentence structure/vocabulary/particles/grammar etc? (What's the generally more efficient order of learning the language.. mainly in the aspect of understanding vocally and reading.. not so much writing so things like stroke order do not concern me)
At the moment, I only know how to read the phonetics of Hiragana but I can't bring myself to reading them without knowing the structure of the sentence they belong in and what they mean.. it just seems pointless to read words without meaning.

A smaller issue is: Does it get easier to notice certain characters within a sentence? Because at the moment I'm having to squint in order to check whether a character has a specific stroke.
Eg. Similar Hira: ねれわ (ne, re, wa) るろ (ru, ro) はほま(ha, ho, ma) あぬめ (a, nu, me)
I'm pretty much incapable of differentiating such characters when reading lines of Hiragana at a normal pace, so I'm having to pause in order to squint at them. :l

I would assume it does get easier considering when you're fluent in English, you only check the basic structure of a sentence and not every single letter (or word for that matter). But that's only -would- assume, considering unlike English, it seems every individual Japanese character has different sounds associated with them to give them different meaning (Though I would again assume this would be easier if I were capable of throwing most of the Hiragana into a Kanji character).

..But enough of that.
I would like to eventually be capable of reading subtitles (or hearing the audio) of video in Kanji/Kana and look up the characters that I do not understand.
This would be a nice method of learning what each character actually means (because they would likely be common conversational characters rather than the minimal use characters I'm not interested in), but I have no idea how sentences are structured and I'm unsure of whether I should be learning the structure of sentences before learning some common Kanji.



Basically (TL;DR), I just want to know the order of which I should be learning things.. a step by step detailed process or something.

Thanks for any help.

Answer:

Hey! I would love to give you a super-detailed explanation, but I don't have time right now...so I'll just direct you over to these threads.
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id…
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id…
Oh, and AJATT.
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo…

Whether you end up doing RTK in the end or not, those forums are great. I'd say, poke around there for a while. AJATT is also a godsend.

When it comes down to it...you really need to find your own way of doing things. A while ago, after finishing the kana, I was just as lost as you were. To be honest, once I finish RTK (in a month, yay!) I'll be lost again. But really, check out those two sites.