If your target language uses a different script, you face a choice in week one: learn the writing system now, or lean on romanised text and come back to it. Almost everyone who postpones it regrets that, and the reason is not discipline.
Romanisation quietly teaches you wrong sounds
Transliteration maps foreign sounds onto letters your language already owns, and you will pronounce them the way your language does. Those habits are hard to undo later. It also hides distinctions the script marks clearly. You end up learning a blurred version of the language and then having to sharpen it.
Most alphabets are a week, not a year
An alphabetic or syllabic system — Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, the Japanese kana — is thirty to fifty symbols. At fifteen minutes a day, reading slowly comes within one or two weeks. Character-based writing is genuinely different and does take years. Even there, learning the sound system and a few hundred common characters early pays for itself.
Learn it by reading, not by drilling the chart
Copying the alphabet table produces recognition without speed. Reading real words — signs, names, labels, the titles of things you already know — builds the automatic decoding you actually need. Start with words whose meaning you already know. Recognising a brand name in the new script is the moment it stops being a code.
Accept being slow for a fortnight
You will read like a six-year-old for about two weeks, and that is the whole cost. Learners who avoid this stage do not skip it — they pay it later with worse pronunciation attached. Read aloud while you do it. The point is to link shape to sound, not shape to meaning.
Learn the script first in almost every case. Two uncomfortable weeks buys you correct sounds, real reading material, and no habit to unpick later.