There are thousands of characters to learn, grammar and word order is very different from English, and even when you read well enough there is a long tail of words that takes a lot of effort to learn.
We are experimenting with various ways to make this easier.
Check them out and pick the one that works best for you :)
This is a story I heard, when I was little, from an old man named Mohei from our village.
Starting fully in Japanese is overwhelming, there are too many words you don't know yet. Vocab mode starts almost entirely in English and sprinkles Japanese in. Mark a word as learned and it shows up in Japanese next time, until you're reading mostly in Japanese.