Reddit reviews Yotsubato! Vol. 1 (Yotsubato!) (in Japanese) (Japanese Edition)
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The decision is up to you, and your final choice should pertain to your situation/interests, but if you do choose to learn Japanese, then I can give you some pointers:
Learning Material
Start by learning Hiragana and Katakana. This should take you 2 weeks tops. You can learn it through apps like Dr. Moku (apple and android), and practice with Drag-n-Drop.
After that, use the Genki textbooks I and II (make sure that it's the 2nd edition, which has more features added to it), which are the most popular by far within the Japanese learning community.
Japan Times, the company behind the books, also made some pretty neat apps to side with the book. Available for apple and android. There's also a workbook, which is a bit of a drag to buy after buying two $50 textbooks, so I uploaded the PDFs here.
Supplement your studies with Anki SRS (Spaced-repetition-system), which is essentially virtual flash cards.
There's also Tae Kim's Grammar Guide, which is pretty good as a reference, but not so much a sole learning material. His website is another good reference resource.
Please realize that it's okay to forget words and grammar points, and you're definitely going to have to revisit some of them along the way.
I should probably mention Kanji. Kanji are characters imported from China during the 5th century, although many have divulged from their modern Chinese equivalent. Genki I+II will teach you 317 kanji (image for scale (sorry for bad quality!!)), and Tobira (the textbook I'm about to mention) will teach you another. There are officially 2136 "Jouyou Kanji", or kanji used in everyday life (e.g. a newspaper). Some people use Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, which I wouldn't recommend since it only teaches you the meaning (which it sometimes lies about), and doesn't even teach the reading or any words that use it. I'd recommend learning words and then the kanji that they use. That way you're getting more bang for your buck. While I personally don't use WaniKani to learn kanji, I have used it in the past, and it's really good. Sleek interface, gets the job done, forums for questions. All the good stuff you'd expect out of a kanji learning site. The first couple of lessons are free, and then it's something like $8/month. Despite WaniKani and all its greatness, the creator behind it (named Koichi) also made an "online Japanese textbook" called Tofugu, which I definitely wouldn't recommend. It waaaay too much around the bush, and half of it is just "motivational talk" (which I'm pretty sure is just trying to get you inspired for a night or two, pull out your wallet, pay for a lifetime subscription, and then give up once you get to the 〜ます forms).
Edit: I also feel the need to mention that, despite what pop culture might tell you, only a tiny portion of kanji are truly pictograph (e.g. 川 (river), 山 (mountain), 人 (person), and 大 (big)). The more conceptual ones have almost no tie to their actual meanings, which is why kanji teaching resources that use mnemonics fall apart pretty quickly. After being written with a chisel on turtle shells (called "oracle bone script"), imported to Japan 1500+ years ago, written 1,000,000s of times from people in prefectures miles away, and reformed numerous times, almost all of them lost their original pictographic quality. Just take a look at 働, 色, and 起. What do you think those mean? The answer is: to work, color, and to get up (in the sense of waking up).
Edit 2: Learn the stroke order for the kanji, since it makes them much easier to break down in the long run. For that matter, learn the radicals, or parts, of the kanji. There's a list here.
To clear up any more misconceptions, Japanese is not like Chinese in the sense that a character alone can be a verb. The kanji "起" doesn't mean "to wake up" on its own; only when you add the "き" and "る" hiragana does it turn into the verb. This is called "おくりがな" (okurigana). There are also many different readings for each character, unlike Chinese where there's usually only one or two. For example, the character "日" (day, sun) can be read ひ (or び), にち, or じつ. One kind of reading is called 音読み (onyomi), literally meaning "sound reading" because when the Japanese came into contact with the Chinese, they didn't yet have a writing system (their language was called "和語" (lit. "native Japanese language"). So, they "borrowed" their characters and transcribed the Chinese pronunciation based on their phonetic system. The other kind of reading is called 訓読み (kunyomi), which literally means "riverside reading". This type of reading is native to Japan and was prescribed to the kanji that corresponded with the meaning. On the more extreme side, some kanji can have 10+ readings. Don't sweat it though (心配ないよ！), as you'll learn all of these different readings through context in your vocabulary.
Now to bridge the gap between "beginner"-ish to "intermediate"-ish, use Tobira (which literally means "bridge"). The book assumes you to have a certain level of knowledge, some of which might overlap with Genki and other words/grammar that you may have to look up. It's an uphill battle, but you'll come out triumphant in the end.
On a side note, I'd recommend Jisho.org as your go-to online dictionary, even if some of the example sentences are riddled with errors. "Imiwa?" is a great Jp<->Eng dictionary for android and iOS. If you're really serious, then get "Kodansha's Furigana Japanese Dictionary".
Also check out /r/learnjapanese. There's a lot of great questions/resource links on there, and you can ask any questions you might have.
Duolingo has opened up alpha testers for its Japanese course as well. I'm so-so on the quality of Duolingo, since it doesn't even really teach you grammar, but just in case.
There are a lot of great resources posted up on the Kanji Koohii forums, which is where I found ヨミちゃん for Google Chrome.
To go further, read 4chan's /int/ guide.
Oh, and in case you didn't know, stay away from Rosetta Stone!!
Native Material
After Genki II, give a go at よつばと！ (Yotsuba!), a simple children's manga with furigana, which is kana above the kanji (intended for little kids). There's quite a bit of slang in it, and almost always uses the casual form. Even in a simple manga like Yotsuba, there will still be words and advanced grammatical constructs you haven't even touched yet. You can get the "Yotsuba Learning Pack", which consists of an Anki deck and vocabulary list here.
You can practice speaking with native speakers on a wonderful app called HelloTalk (available for apple and android). It's pretty great.
There's also iTalki, where you can write journal entries in your target language (so you can do this for Italian too) and have them be corrected by native speakers. You can also correct journal entries in English.
About the JLPT
The "Japanese Language Proficiency Test [Number X]", commonly referred to as "JLPT N[X]", is the standard Japanese test. N1 (Number 1) is the highest and most advanced, while N5 is the most basic. You can see how ready you are for each one here. Honestly, N5 and N4 are so easy, they're really not worth the money you have to pay to take it. N3 is a good warm up to N2. Passing N2 will look pretty damn good on any business related Japanese job. I wouldn't worry about these tests until a good way into your studies.
Conclusion
While Japanese might not be the easiest language for an English speaker to learn (far from it, it in fact), and quite daunting due to the scores of kanji you're required to learn, the rewards are numerous. For one thing, you get 130,000,000 more people to converse with on this planet. You're also opened up to the world of anime (Japanese animation) and manga (Japanese cartoons), and the original language of the haiku (俳句). Not only that, but you're also introduced to the literature world Haruki Murakami and other such Japanese writers. Most importantly, you should enjoy it. After all, nobody who doesn't enjoy learning something gets very far into it. If you ever feel incredibly discouraged, take a break for as long as you need. Revisit the material when you feel ready. Never study something if it pains you to do so. PM me if you have any more questions.
You ask a very good question. Although manga vary widely in difficulty and style, I feel like difficulty is mostly a function of sentence complexity and vocabulary. Keep both low to avoid frustration, and try to read at a level that is difficult, but not frustrating. I didn't learn much from reading anything with more than a couple dictionary lookups per page, but when I breezed through material at a lower level, I began to improve very quickly.
Here are just a few specific suggestions (with crappy plot summaries). PM me if you're interested in one of these and I'll send you some pictures of the insides so you can make a more informed choice:
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An absurdly cheery girl lives with her single dad and learns about their neighborhood, friends, nature, and absolutely everything with childlike wonder. It's probably the easiest read on this list. Manga done by Kiyohiko Azuma, same guy who made Azumanga Daioh.
On a newly terraformed planet Mars, which the characters call Aqua, a girl strives to become an Undine, a woman who guides tourists and locals around her city, Neo-Venezia, a Martian recreation of Earth's Venice.
A former delinquent becomes a teacher and uses his badassery to go above and beyond normal lessons. Mildly ecchi.
Probably the second easiest on this list, but not a lot happens in this manga, so I knocked it down a few steps. An android awaits the return of her master, but he's been gone for decades. The Earth is sparse now, and almost nobody ever shows up to the coffee house where she lives, but people still get on with their everyday lives. Slice of life.
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I'll stop here, but I've got lots more so PM me if you'd like a few more random recommendations. In terms of genre, light comedy, slice-of-life, shoujo drama, and things of that nature tend to be easy. Science fiction, seinen, mysteries, anything cerebral... these tend to be more difficult.
For yotsubato. You can try to read through a sample here http://yotuba.com/yotu_comics.html
I personally find them really enjoyable and a nice break from my anki reps. If you like it heres an amazon link. Its cheap but you have to pay shipping as well
Japanese stuff can be found on Amazon in the states. Just put "Japanese" in your search. You'll probably have to wait several weeks for it to arrive though.
http://www.amazon.com/Yotsubato-Vol-Japanese/dp/4840224668/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1417028750&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=yotsuba+japanese&amp;pebp=1417028753551
Here's a link for you.
Incidentally, Danboard (the series' cardboard-box robot you may have seen around the Internet) is something like Amazon Japan's unofficial mascot.
> Is there something more valuable I could be doing instead of this?
You could buy Totsuba! in Japanese, and try to read it to get a feeling of which directions it's useful to improve your Japanese.
You could create an account on lang-8, and try to find something to say about your day every day.