>>5623267You should probably forget about focusing on random words and phrases for now, they won't be of any use until you learn both kanji and grammar. This is what I suggest you do:
1. Learn hiragana and katakana. It shouldn't take you more than a few days to start getting familiar with it and you will use it everywhere so you'll get plenty of chances to practice. Also you will need it to learn other things (if your study material uses romaji drop it immediately)
2. Start learning kanji right now. It doesn't matter how much grammar and shit you know if you don't know kanji. It might be tough at first but it gets surprisingly easy after some time and it will improve A LOT your memorization skills (which answers your original question). Also don't even bother learning how to write them, it's absolutely useless unless you want to land an administrative kind of job or something like that. And also don't forget to use mnemonics, they really are a huge help
3. Once you know a decent amount of basic kanji (200 should be a good number to get started) you can start learning grammar. Japanese grammar is not that difficult so you'll most likely be good at it way before you finish learning kanji
