I'll start off by saying I'm a complete and utter noob when it comes to Japanese. As in, today marks my 3rd day actually trying to learn. Not some half-baked "Hiragana's good enough for now, I'll go watch a drama with subtitles", as has happened months ago. That being said, I've got a fairly good grip on hiragana, only with little things such as る and ろ that need to be ironed out, and have only started katakana today. I use a website called Memrise, which is essentially Anki with flashcard based SRS. A link to the site is here and the link to my profile is here.

Now that I've given some background, I want to ask some questions about what to do after this initial hiragana/katakana stage.

1. Should I migrate over to Anki? To be honest, I've been avoiding it because the first time I tried to use it, it was somewhat confusing to get to work, e.g. sound and pics would not show up in decks, and it was overall very plain and boring to me. I like Memrise because it uses a "gardening" theme for memorizing, where you plant (learn) memories and water (review) them from time to time. It's a lot more engaging than just seeing "Due: 24". It also uses a multiple-choice system for new items and a typing system for older, learned ones. Again, more engaging than "see せ, click flip, click easy".

A problem though is that all of the decks in Memrise are community created, which means that some things aren't available because no one's made them yet. This also means that some decks' quality isn't exactly up to par. Most of people here use Anki it seems and can quickly link to the best decks to use. So, should I give up my comfortable UI for more, readily available decks?

2. Once I get done with Hiragana/Katakana, I'm guessing I should move straight on to Kanji. I've heard it's easier to learn all the radicals first, then start learning Kanji. After the radicals though, Should I learn Kanji+reading, with meaning later, or Kanji+meaning, with reading later? Maybe just all 3 at once? Should I also put plenty of time into writing?

3. Looking around the forums, I saw a lot about 2k/6k, which is an Anki deck with a bunch of practice sentences in Japanese from what I gathered. should I look into this after I learned all the kanji, a good amount of vocab, and some grammar? Maybe I'm just looking too far ahead at this point.

Anyway, I'd appreciate any feed back and guidance on what to do after the hiragana/katakana stage.

Only my opinion, but
1. Anki is indeed a bit complicated at first. If Memrise works for you, I don't see the need to change! I use it too for other things than Japanese. I believe there's a fair amount of Japanese courses, but you can always create your own too!

2. Did you know that this forum is originally about the "Remember the Kanji" books? Not everyone uses it, but IMO it's useful, it teaches you the radicals and all the ~2000 jouyou (regularly used) kanjis. If you go that way be sure to check the community stories at http://kanji.koohii.com You will only learn the "meaning" though, so it could be a long time before you actually starting learning "real" Japanese. If you'd prefer to get directly to the point, this might not be for you and you could start directly with actual words (which are often 1 or 2 kanjis, kanji + hiragana, hiragana only or katakana only)

3. I personally create my own deck and never tried core 2k/6k/etc. I find it more engaging to find words to learn and create cards by yourself... but in the end it's all about what you want to do... whatever keeps you motivated! At this point there isn't really a better method or a better vocabulary list.

You could start the core deck now if you really wanted to. It's pretty much a fancy vocabulary deck (pictures, sounds, sentences, etc.) of several thousand words. Kanji might make things stick better, but in the end I use it for vocab. and if knowing kanji helps there then even better.

I'd recommend taking a look at a beginner textbook like Genki, which gives you some important grammar, vocab. and even kanji if you want to do that section. Some don't like textbooks but I think they are a helpful way to give yourself direction at the beginning

If you haven't read nukemarine's thread, maybe it's a good place to start.

1. This is subjective. Anki and memrise do similar things. Others like memrise, I like anki because it is more customizable, but there's only the right answer for you. Consider that you probably don't want to change once you get thousands of vocabulary under your belt. Maybe trying both concurrently for a week or two before you decide...?

2. I believe learning kanji, reading, and meaning at the same time (separate cards though..) would be the way to go because they help reinforce each other. Learning radicals first isn't a bad idea, but beware that RTK uses different names from some radicals, so you should probably go with the radicals from RTK. You can get an anki deck here.

3. A lot of people here, myself included, swear by the core decks because it's a full package. You learn vocabulary, practice grammar, listening comprehension, pronunciation, etc.. The only thing that's missing is grammar instruction. So there's no need to learn vocabulary before starting core. Most people finish at least 1000 kanji before starting core. For vocabulary, I might suggest that you do the first few hundred core cards as vocabulary only cards so that you have the vocabulary for the sentences. But the nice thing about core is that someone sorted them so that there's only one new word per card, so make sure you get one called "optimized" or "n+1". I'm stuck with a different deck, but I'd try this deck if I were starting now.

To learn the Kanji, I used the book Remember the Kanji, by James Heisig, and followed the instructions. I also used Anki, and the stories on this site (I used an Anki deck that has links to the stories on this site). I'm happy with how it went.

Afterwards, I haven't studied the readings of Kanji. I learned most of the Japanese vocab I know through listening to countless hours of audio (sometimes while watching Japanese shows with subs, sometimes without subs, sometimes by listening to music or radio), and then I built on that by learning how to read those words and a few more, here and there (by reviewing recognition decks with Anki, and by reading manga, as well as other texts with Rikaichan).

I'm happy with how that went too, and going through that process convinced me that studying Kanji readings is an entirely pointless exercise that won't get you closer to Japanese fluency. I don't think you should pay any attention whatsoever to the readings of individual Kanji. Once you finish RtK, just try and remember how individual words are written, and knowledge of Kanji readings will come automatically from that.

IMO having just learned the kana diving right into something like CORE will leave you using furigana as a crutch and it would be a painful process, unless you have some awesome kana-only vocab memory, which I would be envious of greatly.

If you have to dive into something practical, I would start off with an introductory level text book like Genki. There are Kanji there too but they slowly introduce them along with vocab and doing the exercises/reading will help your kana knowledge sink in, and learn some grammar at same time.

If you can hold off on that for a while, I would really suggest doing RTK first. The knowledge you gain in the process will streamline everything that comes after, vocab wise. This will delay your vocab start but put you in a better position for the long run.