I recommend learning verbs and particles of sentences, so you can put words together into sentences easier.

I'm taking Japanese 101 right now, the weeaboo I am, and we started off learning the basic phrases (How are you, Good morning, Hello, Good Evening, I'm sorry, No Problem, Goodbye, Take care, etc.)

Then we learned how to form sentences such as "I'm going to ______" and "I eat/drink/buy _______" after learning the e and o particles and some verbs and nouns. We learned basic things like how to say a few different foods/drinks, and things to buy like books and shirts. We also learned basic places like home, school, and coffee shop, but we mostly focused on how to form the sentences. I enjoy how we're learning and I'm doing pretty well, so I recommend you try that! I feel like nouns are easier to learn later, but it's more important to start off with building sentences until it becomes second nature.