I’m teaching myself japaneses through my iphone and I’ve decided to just memories the most used words (from a list I found) and watch anime to learn the order of the words and pronunciation. It seems to be the easiest thing since I hate memorizing sentence structures etc. and always forget what exactly it is an adverb is and so on. All I really want is to speak it and maybe read it (I have an app for learning different sets of characters). But since you say it’s better to learn in phrases, it’d be great if you could give a list. I’m a native speaker of both english and spanish, so if it’s too much work to make one or if you don’t have one in english and happen to have it in spanish that’d also be helpful. Whatever is easier for you, either language would be great!