How to study Japanese?

I'll try to keep this short.

I want to start learning Japanese, but since I don't have Pimsleur money I need a method to hit it.  Right now I have 'A Guide to Writing Kanji And Kana' Book 1 and 2, by Wolfgang Hadamitzky and Mark Spahn, and Living Language's 'Ultimate Japanese' (which is supposedly a VERY shitty book, but it was free and I'm using it for grammar/conjugation only.)  I'm debating making flash cards as well.

So, how should I go about learning it?  I'm sure just reading it won't be enough...

http://www.learnjapanesefree.com/

Japanese is the official language of Japan. It is called "Nihongo" in Japanese. Japanese script has been adopted from the Chinese language. The Chinese script was modified and three different scripts of Japanese were created. The language is written by combining three scripts whose names are Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. In olden time, Japanese was written vertically. In addition, it was written from right to left and would start from the very last page to the first page. In other words, from back to front. However, in modern times this system has been changed and is written in the normal way.