Three alphabets? Ok, that's like learning English, English and Spanish. XD
They must have a lot to talk about, seeing how they need three alphabets. XD
That or they just like to read...a lot. XD
@Paul:
Yookoso (An Invitation To Contemporary Japanese)
ISBN: 0-07-072291-9
Kanji & Kana (Revised Edition)
ISBN: 0-8048-2077-5
A Guide To Reading & Writing Japanese
ISBN: 0-8048-0226-2
Oxford Japanese Minidictionary
ISBN: 0-19-860366-5
漢�*�(下) 小�*�1年 (Kanji for 1st Graders)
ISBN: 4-318-01145-3
Yookoso is a textbook for Japanese classes, it's pretty good for techincalites; Kanji & Kana and A Guide To R&W Japanese are both amazing Kanji reference indexes; Oxford is a great pocket dictionary since it lists everything in Kana and gives multiple verb forms; Kanji For 1st is a fullout Japanese workbook, no English, it's from the motherland. Having a real workbook is great so you can learn how real Japanese learn. Also try to find some normal Japanese books to read. I can recommend some pretty good Japanese fantasy books if you're interested.
A pretty good and fun study technique I use is this, take maybe anywhere from twenty minutes to a half hour and look up words in the Oxford dictionary. It should give you Romanjii listings as well, try to find common words and memorize them and their meanings. Next, put on a good number of Japanese songs. See if you can find the words you learned and try to connect them to other words to learn their meanings as well. Eventually you'll be able to put together phrases and sentences pretty easy.
Another place that can help is
Japan-Guide. Go there, sign up and get yourself a penpal, you can teach each other stuff from your languages and such. People there reply pretty fast, I got five replies on my first day there.
Also, immerse yourself in Japanese as much as you can. It really helps if you only listen to Japanese music, only watch Japanese shows, without subtitles if possible. Try not to watch anime, watching live action shows is a lot better when you're trying to pick up on the language, you'll understand the mannerisms and actions easier if you see real people doing it in a real fashion and not how anime tends to exaggerate. It'll be easier if you're constantly hit with Japanese from all sides, your brain will naturally put things together for you. If classes aren't an option for you, like they aren't for me, you'll find it's easier to learn this stuff on your own. It helps if you know people that know Japanese to begin with, but just asking around should be enough.