Thank you so much for that extensive text! I've just recently learned Hiragana on my own (using two Android Apps and pen&paper writing) and learning by reading a german japanese learning book. Since i self study in my free time i switch between those all the time (learning hiragana, writing them on paper, reading book) i was wondering what might be a good next step. Actually i currently try to learn some Kanji and grammar and did not yet learn a single katakana.. Having finally learnt Hiragana and learnign some basic sentence structure i feel like my next step should be to write and read basic sentences in hiragana only and then move to learn some basic Kanji. Don't know yet when to learn Katakana, but currently i feel not like learning them as well, since i just learned the other alphabet and would like to have at least success doing something with that.

I didn't know about SRS, so that looks like a good way to learn some words while on the train. I will give it a try! The japanese learning book i got is only an e-book and i plan to buy a real book, so i am looking at Genki now.

As a reference, i found http://www.japan-activator.com/ (an Android paid App) very useful..