Sounds like you're employing Iversen's “epiphany method”

(I, too, have decided to change up what I'm doing to learn Spanish to something much more similar to this as well, basically he's pretty well sold me on the idea, I can't wait to see what happens)

Cheers,
Andrew

Don't forget that Japanese has its phonetic systems but also 200o odd Kanji characters, non- phonetic, see my comment on Hesig below as a possible solution to that.

Yaay I have just discovered I can read German, wonder how many other European languages I can read .

In reference to the Chinese comments, if you are going to start Chinese look up Heisig method, based on a memory association technique with visual stories originally developed in the 1970's for learning Japanese Hanzi (which are mostly the same as traditional Chinese characters). Heisig's stories (which then develop into a system that allow the user to apply their own stories) were based on tried and tested memory association at the time and on anysis of the structural component similarities in characters (much more efficient than treating each character in isolation). Personally I don't like learning that way but for memorisation of Chinese character structure (or Japanese Hanzi) depending on which version you choose is unparalled imho.

To save time for commentators who are confused about pinyin romanisation for Chinese, unlike for languages like Thai it is essential to nail it early on, rather than being a crutch for learning it is an essential tool for most native Chinese, most use pinyin input systems to write chinese on computers, they use pinyin to txt on their mobiles, to input Chinese characters into electronic dictionionaries etc. etc. Their own character dictionaries for their own use have pinyin indexing to allow them to look up obscure characters they have forgotten etc. Whether you hit characters early or not you need pinyin to master Chinese writing (older Chinese that never learned it at school or later are stuck with writing tablets and handwriting recognition software, which is slow).

Note: There are other Chinese romanisation systems and input systems like wubi (hard to learn even if you are Chinese). But pinyin is the best.

That's a very tall order and would be an extremely difficult task in any language. I don't know any Japenese, but it isn't special in this.

It's important to remember that your goals for how you use the language are not the same as others', so what some of us attempt to achieve may in fact not be that hard, even if it's more than basic travel lingo.

Good job on achieving all that yourself though!