It has been a few months since I have started to learn Japanese. But, if we count the exact hours, I might have put in around 20-30 hours of work till now. Since, I am self-learning, I have my own methods that I am comfortable with. Let me share it with you.

Our brain is very good at noticing patterns. If you find children's stories on any language on YouTube with picture, you can pretty much figure out the subject, object, and verb placement after watching a few videos. If you want to make the process even easier, you can simply look for grammar blogs to figure out the subject, object, and verb placement in the target language that you are learning.

Once you know where the verb lies (at the end of the sentence for Japanese, Nepali, Hindi, etc., the second word of the sentence in English, and the first word of the sentence in Arabic), you can pretty much learn the basic verbs after watching a few story-based videos. If the video has picture and you start to understand the verbs, you can get a sense of what some of the nouns mean as well.

For Japanese, I figured out that the verb lies at the end of the sentence first. Then I started to watch YouTube videos that were thematic in nature. For example, if the video was about eating then I was more likely to know that the verb that was being repeated a lot is either about eating, related with eating, or a 'be' verb. Then, I watched videos on other theme to deduce whether the verb is actually about eating or not (if it is repeated a lot in other videos then it's a 'be' verb, if it is used in an eating context, then it's eating).

In this sense, you get a very natural sense of the language that does not entirely depend on grammar. Once you have a good grasp of basic verb and nouns, and figure out how pronouns work, you can pretty much craft a communicable sentence. Also, it might be useful to know what are the particular grammar features in the language that might not be used in other languages. For example, Japanese has particles that are not really used in English.

Hope this was helpful. You can always reach out to me if you have any questions!