Hello, Googly Colin! Welcome to the forum!
Congratulations on your decision to start learning the language.
It's tough to learn a language on your own, especially the sounds and the interactive part.
Just make sure to enunciate the 5 vowels which are all pure monophthongs unlike English, and the basic consonants are either voiced or unvoiced.
There is no distinction between aspirated (puffed) or unaspirated (unpuffed); just mush 'em together and they should sound fine.
Once you have a couple of conversational phrases, there is the voice chat feature in skype. Using that you can try conversing with native speakers of Japanese for exchange of English.
Good luck in your studies.
O, and then you can post your language questions in the "Learning Japanese" section, too.