Learning to Read Japanese: Hiragana

 Your first step to learning to read and write Japanese will be to learn hiragana. In order to streamline your hiragana studies, I suggest that you skip the writing practice for now and save it for later on in your studies. I know, this might seem like weird advice, but look at it this way, when's the last time you actually had to write something down that you couldn't just type up on a computer? Exactly. There will only be a handful of times where you'll actually have to write something down in Japanese, so save yourself the time for now and just focus all of your brain power into mastering hiragana.
 
  The absolute best site for drilling hiragana into your mind is Smart.fm! At smart.fm, they use an application that works much like flashcards but it is much more efficient and organized, it has voice samples from native speakers, and best of all it's free! Just take it slow and learn a few hiragana a week using smart.fm as your online flash cards.
  
  I'll save you the time and give you a link to the hiragana goal on smart.fm here.