Go to Tofugu.com and learn hiragana and katakana there. They use mnemonics and pictures for each character to make it easier to remember. Once you learned all the hiragana and katakana, read and write the characters until you mastered hiragana and katakana. For kanji, I recommend wanikani.com. You will learn the radicals first and then lean the kanji that are composed of the radical you learned using mnemonics. There are 50 levels but it will take 1-2 years to learn 1,700 kanji from that website. It is very fun to learn kanji that way rather than rote memorization. I hope this helps.

The best piece of advice I was given when starting was to never use romaji and only use hiragana and katakana. It's difficult at first but the more you write out the basic phrases using the correct characters the more they'll come naturally. If you work hard you can learn both alphabets in only a few weeks before tackling the dreaded kanji! :)

Hiragana and Katakana, just write again and again. Children in Japan learn Japanese letters like that. :) Kanji is originated from drawings. For example, 木 ( き / ki ), which means a tree, looks like tree, isn't it? And 林, which have too trees in one letter, means grove ( small forest ). Moreover, 森, which have three trees in one letter, of course means big forest! It is interesting to think about how Kanji was made. The more interesting, the easier to learn!

さわ

I use this method for kanji however it works for any language: For every kanji that I want to learn I search that kanji in the Google images. Most of the humans are better in remembering pictures so I am. This way every time I want to recall the kanji then I recall the picture and never forget it.