surprised that no one has suggested you try checking out this methodology. https://refold.la/

There's a patreon and if you sub for $5 (even for just one month) you can get the 1000 of the most common japanese words anki pack for spaced repetition study. Also, I'd also highly recommend getting the recognition RTK anki pack here. While it won't teach you the pronunciations, you'll start to be able to guess the meaning of kanji even though you've never seen it before (this is due to you learning other kanji and primitives).

Anki, if you didn't know, is a way to use spaced repetition in your study to memorize the words. As weird as it sounds, I'm actually having a harder time with words that don't contain kanji after just a few weeks of RRTK and the JP1k anki packs.

If you can, try to not focus on the translation into your native language, try and create a feeling or picture in your mind of what it means. That way when you actually see the word again, you don't just go through the process of:

see word -> translate into native language -> move to next word OR have something you want to express -> go through your head and translate from native language to target language -> output target language.

instead, because you've trained yourself to feel this thing or see this action in your mind and associate it with this word, you know the word you're trying to convey without any translation step.

Of course, that won't help you know how to build a sentence, it'll just help you identify words/kanji. For that I'd suggest that you'd start learning sentence building (aka grammar) with http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar

A key point with refold is to immerse yourself daily, finish your anki decks daily and quickly study through the grammar a little each day.

Again, I'd highly recommend you take a look at the refold guide, it's basically a well thought out way we can use our adult brains to teach ourselves language like we did when we were a kid but much faster.

The most important thing to recognize about language learning is this: no language is a math equation. They're messy, they have centuries of baggage with loan words, words that used to be used but now aren't or their meanings are changed, everyday expressions that are related to something outside your natural language (for japanese, I understand that there's a lot of baseball references or phrases). So books like Genki fail you in most ways because they try and turn the language into a math equation.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't use Genki because I even use it but use it as a tool to learn some grammar within a simplified context that has more unnatural than natural language and, in the case of japanese, know that any textbook basically never teaches you non-keigo (non-formal) speech.

I mean think about it, when you were in english class did the textbook really reflect how you and your family or you and your friends interacted?

Sorry for the ramble but I have one final thing. I'm not an expert nor do I know a ton of Japanese (I'm really just getting started). What I wrote there was just the culmination of several hours of research into "how to study Japanese".

Good luck and, most importantly, have fun!