All the answers here are terrible. I suggest you look into r/LearnJapanese they have tons of resources.
A few things to keep in mind—
Some guy above said watching anime is a bad way to learn Japanese, which is what people who barely know Japanese always love to parrot. Go watch Matt vs Japan's video.
Kids in Japan grow up watching Doraemon, Shin-chan and other anime like those. Those anime also have exaggerated voice. Does it mean that they are learning wrong Japanese? No.
The goal is not to imitate how they talk. The goal is to understand what they're saying. Familiarizing yourself with the words.
Watch tons of anime, listen to Japanese music, try to watch J-drama, and although it might be a bit difficult for you now but try to follow Japanese news channels because they often speak what most people would call proper Japanese. Change all of your settings to Japanese and try to settle in the Japanese side of the internet (mixi, niconico, news site comment sections, especially 5ch but I would not recommend it because the Japanese they speak is very weird and you will not be able to understand it no matter what you do right now).
And of course, the basics are also important. Hopefully, you have already completed Hiragana and Katakana. If so, then try learning as many radicals as you can before blindly jumping into memorizing Kanji. Understand the grammar first (like Japanese is a SOV language). The cultural nuances and pitch tones (way too advanced stuff) comes later.
Don't ignore writing. You might think that writing is unnecessary since most resources are available online and you can just learn online. I and everyone I know who speaks good English learned was through writing. Writing is one of the best ways to memorize stuff and learn languages.
Keep in mind that the goal is to not to translate Japanese to your language in your head. It's to learn Japanese as a proper language. If you don't understand a meaning of a character, look up what it means in Japanese, not in English.
Congrats on the scholarship. I did not even know they gave those anymore.