掲示板 Forums - Ideas for helping an absolute beginner start learning Japanese?

I have a friend online who has expressed interest in learning Japanese, but says they aren't good at self-teaching, so I've been trying to help them get started.　They really are at the very beginning stage, though, having very little knowledge of even hiragana.　So far what I've been trying to do is draw a little infographic each day that features five hiragana (or more, if it's a situation like こ→ご）with the stroke order as well as a simple (2 or 3 kana) word that uses said hiragana, with pictures in place of a textual definition. (So as an example, when going over vowels, I used the word いぬ, wrote it in romaji, and then drew a picture of a dog.) Another thing I've been doung is sending them a message every day--could be about anything--but at least one word in it is in Japanese. I use a format there that is basically (猫・ねこ・neko ‐ cat) to try to show what the kanji looks like as well as the hiragana and such thinking that maybe it might help to be exposed to snippets of the language frequently. I guess overall I'm wondering if anyone has more ideas I can try or if they have any comments on these methods, like if there's a better way to carry them out or if they migh wind up being less useful than hoped.

I learned to write/read hiragana and katakana using YouTube videos. And like demonhead said, writing them over and over again. Maybe your friend could try https://www.erin.ne.jp/en/ for some fun (free) lessons. Finding something in Japanese that I was really interested in understanding was what spurred me to try to force myself to understand it; maybe something like that would work for your friend as well.