Grammar is easier if you have more vocabulary, but honestly, starting it early doesn’t necessarily hurt. At least familiarizing yourself with basic sentence structure can give you a nice foundation for later.
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In general textbooks do not assume that you prestudy a lot of vocabulary and kanji before you start them (the wanikani style “learn a lot of the writing system stuff up front” approach is unusual). You can learn the vocab as you go along.
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You can get the basics of the basics of Japanese grammar without needing more than 10 words (I’m talking about the basics about verbs, adjectives and particles) but after that it does get a lot easier if you have some basic kanji/vocab knowledge. See Cure Dolly below for a Japanese Grammar course that’s extremely light on vocab and kanji.
If you want to go fast (and apparently, you do), my advice would be to do everything at the same time, but just focus more heavily on one area at a time.
Here’s what I did a little over a year ago when I started:
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One level/week Wanikani (I maintained this until level 40, I recommend doing it at least to level 20 and then see how you feel about it. Returns diminish strongly past level 30 or so).
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Use the guide/textbook of your choice to understand basic Japanese grammar. If you can bear the weird presentation I found Cure Dolly useful for that alongside Tae Kim’s guide. Tae Kim is harder to follow without basic vocab/kanji, but he does list all vocab used for every section at the beginning of that section, so it’s not painful to cross-reference.
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I did not finish either of these resources. I think I made it to about lesson 25 for Cure Dolly and basically halfway through Tae Kim while I was working through the first 20 or so WK levels. At this point grammar will be a bit of a mush in your brain and you’ll confuse everything all the time, but that’s good (IMO). This is the primordial soup we’re going to shape into something usable later.
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Once you near WK level 30 you’ll probably want to slowly switch your focus away from kanji and more towards other areas of the language because you’ll probably find yourself more limited by grammar and kana vocab than raw kanji recognition by this point. For this reason, “speedrunning” WK all the way to 60 in a year is not a good idea IMO, but if the achievement motivates you then why not.
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To do this I used Bunpro: I followed their own lesson order and went through all of N5, N4 and eventually N3, doing two to three lessons a day. Assuming an average of 2 lessons a day it will take you about 9 months to go through all of that. That leaves the N2/N1 stuff for later, but honestly that’s vastly less important at this point IMO.
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While you’re doing this you should absolutely read simple Japanese (I use videogames and manga for that mainly, NHK Easy is good too).
And basically that’s where I am right now after one year and two months. I finished the Bunpro N3 grammar last month, now I focus on my reviews and slowly making my way to level 60 in WK while I also try to read at least one hour every day.
At this point I will say that I generally understand ~90% of what’s said in basic dialogues in games and manga, and often I can infer the meaning of what I don’t understand. The main barrier for comprehension at this point is vocabulary, not grammar or kanji.
I think I went pretty fast here but I still have a very long way to go until I can claim any sort of fluency. In particular do note that I focused almost exclusively on understanding written Japanese, I struggle to understand even very basic spoken Japanese because the silly nihonjin don’t speak in kanji!
Also note that the only reason I could do all of this is because I have a very flexible schedule and a lot of free time. I work from home as a software dev, I have to kids etc… I don’t think the above schedule is reasonable for 99% of people. Not because I’m smarter, but just because I have more time to dedicate to Japanese than most people.
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Thank you for you story and your advices, they’re really helpful <3
I belong to the 1% that have a very flexible schedule and a lot of time as well, so that should work for me 
I’ll start looking into the basics of Grammar today then, and thank you again for your recommendations!
I’m sure that probably helps to an extent, but it’s not a substitute for listening to people speak as they normally would in daily conversation. You don’t want to sound like an anime character or pop idol.
There are plenty of free, beginner-friendly podcasters/Youtube content creators like Nihongo Con Teppei, Japanese with Shun, etc. Start using them – listen when you’re cleaning the house, taking a walk, etc.
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Thanks a lot, that will surely help!
For listening, you also might find the. Conversations of Marugoto helpful. You can find them for free on the Marugoto site. It’s organised from A1 to B2 I think
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It takes native Japanese about nine years to learn the jouyou kanji, and even then, many can’t read a Japanese newspaper. I don’t think you can read fluently in only two years. I guess my main question is, what’s the big rush? I admit, I wanted to go fast at first too, but now, almost two years in, I’ve just resigned myself to it being a long process. My Japanese teacher told me it took her 20 years to learn English to her current level (very fluent). I know this sounds cliche, but try to enjoy the journey because shortcuts won’t get you the results you want, and it would be easy to burn out if you rush it.
I would be a little cautious about this. I used to listen to a lot of Japanese music when I was just starting Japanese and while it does help with getting used to the sounds of the language, it’s quite far from regular sentence intonation, because pronunciation in songs aligns with music. Also, the choice of words is often far from ordinary.
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I am grateful that you are telling me this, but I don’t believe I will need 9 years to learn 2100 Kanji (at least not with WaniKani)… and I have been studying English for like 10 years and am already pretty fluent, apart from the fact that I still need to learn a lot more vocabulary (if I extended my vocabs a bit, I could probably even be considered actually fluent).
The reason why I want to get fluent (or let’s say decent) so fast is because I want to challenge myself. In the past, I’ve already done a lot of things I originally thought were impossible (at least for me), and still somehow managed to pull them off.
Also, I really want to use Japanese as a language because I think it’s just the best 
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I agree, it won’t take you 9 years to learn the Kanji, but my point was that even for native speakers, it takes a long time, so maybe people shouldn’t put that kind of pressure on themselves? Just learning the kanji to the point where you can recognize them doesn’t mean you’ll understand how they’re used or all the vocabulary they’re used in. Japanese is so completely different from English, I couldn’t have imagined it when I first started. You’re definitely at the right place with WaniKani, though! I’m so happy I started with it about a year and a half ago. I’m at level 41 now. Enjoy the journey, and if you aren’t fluent (whatever that even means) in two years, don’t give up! And if you are, then congratulations! 
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That’s true, but English isn’t my first language. And I don’t feel like that is a lot of pressure, to be honest, I am just a person who always try to go at the speed of light when learning something new, as when I start learning it, I am always motivated the most Not that I would quit anything, but I just get very slow after a while sometimes, and that’s something I really want to avoid, especially when learning a new language.
Thank you for your encouraging words, though 
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