The script question is actually two separate problems if you're doing Japanese, which is the first thing that wasn't obvious to me when I started, because Japanese uses three different writing systems and they need pretty different approaches. Kana (hiragana and katakana) is a phonetic alphabet, so you're learning sounds mapped to shapes, and it's genuinely learnable in a few weeks if you're consistent, it doesn't feel that way at first, but it is. Kanji is a different thing entirely, meaning-based characters, thousands of them, and the experience of learning one and then not recognizing it four days later is something I dont think anyone fully warns you about before you start.
For kana specifically, what actually stuck for me was using mnemonics tied to the visual shape of the character rather than just drilling flashcards cold, like the character for "nu" (ぬ) looks vaguely like noodles if you squint at it, and once that image was in my head it stayed. Pure repetition worked eventually but it took longer than it should have and felt like filling a leaky bucket. Katakana I did second, and it was harder because I was already tired of the process (and because a lot of the shapes look similar to each other in a way hiragana doesnt, which is its own special problem).
Kanji is where most people either find a system or quietly give up, from what I can tell. I used WaniKani for a while, which teaches you the component parts before the full character, and that helped me visually parse new kanji faster even when I wasn't writing anything out, because I started seeing pieces instead of trying to memorize the whole shape at once. The review pile thing is real though, if you let it stack up for even a week, you come back to like 300 cards and it becomes this demoralizing wall, I reset a level twice because of it.
Actual reading, before I felt anywhere close to ready, was where it stopped being abstract for me, I started with something aimed at young kids (Yotsuba& is the one everyone recommends and the recommendation is correct) and even then it was painful for the first few months, but seeing the same kanji show up across multiple chapters in actual sentences does something that flashcard drilling doesn't. It stopped feeling like memorization and started feeling like recognition, which are pretty different experiences.