Stay motivated. (Have a really good reason that will push you.)

Stay interested. (Keep things interesting to you. Fun is important.)

Stay focused. (Don't wander off track when you should be studying) <- I need to stay aware of this, too!

You don't need a Ph.D. in neurobiology or linguistics to learn this or any other language. It turns out that humans are really good at this language learning thing.

You need to practice. Lots and lots of it. If you suck at something, the only way to get better is to practice.

Have fun!

My ha'porth:

- Set up Anki for drills rather than some simplistic notion of optimisation. Set the default 'ease' to 150% (or lower), and set the initial intervals to something like 20, 40, 80, 120, 240. Set the lapse intervals to the same. This means that reviews for new/lapsed cards will often carry over to the following day, but that's OK. Add more if you want.　Anki will eventually grow the intervals too fast no matter what you do

- Learn the kanji in Heisig/component order by reviewing kanji -> keyword (pace Heisig). Kanji -> keyword is easier to learn, faster to review, less sensitive to similar/synonymous keywords, is immediately useful when you move on to sentences, and makes keyword -> kanji much easier later if you feel the need to do that (for some obscure reason). Write out the 五十音 for hiragana and katakana every now and then, as a preparation for later. Carefully identify all the primitives in each kanji, and use visual imagery etc to associate it with the meaning, as per Heisig. Watch out for Heisig's mistakes/bad choices (check each kanji at koohii before adding).

- Make a start on the core 6k. Use Nukemarine's optimised core 2k/6k deck, as it has native audio for all but one or two of the sentences. Sort the deck into sentence order before starting. Suspend all the cards, and manually un-suspend them when adding. When adding cards, look ahead in the browser and add the easiest ones first. Add related sentences together. Ignore any you don't like the look of - they will seem a lot easier later.

- Put the kanji sentence on the front of the card, and everything else on the back. Read each sentence aloud slowly and clearly, and then imitate the native speaker. Fail a card if you make any kind of mistake with the reading, but be lenient with the meaning. I find the meaning and other details tend to develop with repeated exposure, and only fail on it if the interval has grown to more than a week or so. Don't bother trying to translate the sentences, just focus on accurate reading, and a broad impression of the meaning of individual words. Leave the details for later, once the reading is secure. For some sentences, it's useful to have a 'disambiguation' field. I find putting 音読み or 訓読み is usually enough. Use any lame trick you can think of to get the readings, including coincidences within the sentence, e.g.:

  庭にバラを植えました -> にわに -> On your にs, planting roses!

- Don't bother with grammar until you've added at least 1000 sentences. By all means skim Tae Kim's guide etc, but until you've got a solid (passive) vocab under your belt and plenty of exposure, reading a grammar guide is uphill work. Leave the details for later.

- Don't expect everything you learn in Anki to be immediately transferable into the 'wild'. Don't be tempted to make things difficult by 'doing it the hard way' - e.g. single words on cards, memorizing whole sentences, writing whole sentences, etc. I learned the hard way that these things cannot be done efficiently by someone who can barely read hiragana.

- I've finished RTK 1 + 3 + misc extras, and am about to finish core 6k (60 sentences left - the 'dregs'), so this is pretty much where I'm at. Gonna start reading (more) stuff & making my own cards next.

HTH