Books + Outdated material?

Hey guys! I'm learning japanese (Shameless plug, thanks to lentil.cc I actually know the kana ahead of time. Holla, my friends!) and I just wanted to know of some good learning material/books I should buy? I'm kinda on a budget of $100 dollars a month for self entertainment, which I intend to spend on my stuff for learning.

Anyhow!
I want to know what books would be good to buy for information on sentence structure and the like. No matter how much I google this, I just cannot wrap my head around it. I don't know if it's the concept of a different word order or what. I actually get particles really well, and can write (albeit in all kana, I don't know any useful kanji) simple sentences, but pretty much everything else I'm kind of brain dead on.
Then I want a good book for learning the kanji. In a perfect world it would have The kanji, stroke order/count, pronunciation, and english meaning, and maybe some example sentences. But if all else fails, I'll go with Remembering the Kanji, Essential Kanji, or the kanji learners dictionary from Halpern.


Also, I found a copy of Iwanami's Comprehensive English-Japanese Dictionary for like 8 dollars. I know it's kinda old, but is it really outdated? I mean, it's a HUGE book, and I figure a lot of the words will be the same. I went ahead and bought it, but I just wanna know if it's severely outdated to the point of uselessness.

Back to kanji real quick. I read a sample of remembering the kanji, and I really like it, but I read some reviews saying that his keywords werent all that accurate. Also, are keywords the translation of the kanji? Because I don't wanna say/write one thing thinking it means something when it means something similar but still different, thus changing the meaning of what I wrote.


Thank you SO much for reading the wall of text, I appreciate the time :D

Anyone? Please?

OK, I'm not an expert in any way but let me make a recommendation on the dictionary. I'm a Japanese major who does not have any experience of self study, but based on my experience I'd say jisho.org is a very good online dictionary with example sentences. I'd choose it over a paper dictionary; I'm not saying the one you bought is not good but here's another alternative. I feel one really must take the context in account when choosing which word to use so those sentences really come in handy. Sometimes there's so many words that (in english) seem to mean the same but the difference is huge and usage is very strict to the context...

I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with Remembering the kanji but you might find some interesting information at the forum here: http://forum.koohii.com/
My university uses another series of kanji books but I've found some interesting study tips etc on there anyway.

Starting to learn Japanese can be very misleading, in my experience. I found that I made very quick progress with kana and simple sentences like 'kore ha pen desu' / 'kore ha pen desu ka', but that quickly changed when more grammar got added.

I could only recommend you to focus on grammar most from the start as that will make you understood in Japan and will make you understand Japanese. It is very tempting to spend a lot of time studying kanji and neglect the grammar, but if your aim is to communicate with people, you cannot get away from grammar and vocabulary, IMO.

As grammar quickly gets complicated, I found that I got hopelessly lost in my self study books and I joined one of those cheap Japanese language lessons that I found in my town which really kickstarted my progress.

The best books Re: grammar that I found was the 'Modern Japanese' (Bowring/Laurie) from Cambridge. As already mentioned, the jisho.org is a nice interface to the Jim Breen Edict dictionary files and free. For vocabulary drills, I found http://www.renshuu.org/ useful.

Join a main library or branch.

Japanese libraries welcome their language learners by providing tons of books at all levels sometimes with helpful librarians to decipher and assist.