Newbie

I made a lot of mistakes when I first started playing so I'll try to help you prevent some of them.

The only advice I can give you is to hold onto all of your units, feathers, and resources until you've played the game for a bit longer. Promoting characters and foddering characters is not a good idea early on.

When summoning using a free summon (first time pulling on a banner), it's cheaper to just pull on the entire circle. Also, when you're summoning for units, make sure you click on "Appearance Rate" to check the percentages when pulling on a banner. I always try to reset the percentage to 3% before the banner ends that way your orbs don't disappear in vain.

DON'T FODDER YOUR FREE TAKUMI. He's not a great unit but he's free and comes with a great skill you can pass along to another unit once you've played the game for a bit longer.

There should be a free "Choose Your Legends" banner. The best pick is Veronica (colorless cavalry staff).

1. A good time to start would be around the time the Legendary banner drops on Dec. 27th at 11 PM PST (or Dec. 28th if you live basically anywhere else). These summoning banners generally have a lot of powerful/useful units for combat or for skill fodder--good value if you don't really care what you get and just want a bunch of mostly good 5-Stars. If you want to try and get your foot in high Tier Arena (one of the end game modes), you could try and snipe for multiple copies of Legendary Heroes (to merge up) on these banners, though I think it's best to just spend your first month of so understanding how the game works before focusing on the Arena. All new players also have access to two free Brave (or Choose Your Legends) Heroes that are pretty nice for clearing most content in this game and a Hero Fest banner which offers great pull rates for great units, along with whatever banners are running currently.

2. Off the top of my head, Corrin (M) is a white-haired male unit that you can summon. (There may be more that I'm missing.) He's in the 3- and 4-Star rarity, but it may take a (long) while before you can pull him since there are so many units in that rarity.

3. I don't think it's possible to do English text with Japanese audio, but I honestly don't have too much experience about dual audio in this game. (Though, if you are on the fence about English voice acting in this game, I think that most of cast are done really well.)

Anyway, welcome to FEH!

1. The best time to start playing is now. The sooner you start the less orbs you miss out on from things like limited time quests/daily orb etc.

2. Yes, there are several white haired males in the game. Niles, Corrin, Walhart, Silas, Jagen, etc.

3. No. The english version has english audio. You can't change it.

Start playing now so you get used to the mechanics, as well as receiving daily orbs. You likely want to stay in the F2P route, so better now than later to gather as many orbs. I only played 1 Fire Emblem game and 2 partially, and I really enjoy this game.

There are White Haired Male Units, like Robin, Jacob, Corrin, etc. Can't remember much, but there are more.

No, can't play it in English w/ Japanese Audio. I'm on the same boat of wanting that as well. Enjoy the game when you play it.

ALSO, when you get a free unit at the beginning called "Takumi", who is an archer, KEEP HIM cuz he has a transferable skill called "Close Counter". I got rid of him and I instantly regretted it after I realized what it's used for.

One tip I want to give is not to be afraid to ask the Q&A here if you're usure.

Since this game can get a bit more complicated than Fate:GO where unit builds and fodder is concerned.

You'll be getting more rare characters than in Fate, but you'll be giving them up for various reasons too.

Join time: as far as I know, the sooner the better. In this game it just amounts to more resources collected.

White haired males: male Robin comes to mind. But if you want to search for his character page, just type Robin.

Before you start, though, I would caution you against this game. The higher-ups calling the shots for the development team have demonstrated an inability NOT to ruin good game modes with fudge factors that are blatantly, unabashedly designed to give whales a free ticket to the top with a minimum of skill. It makes f2p accomplishments feel a bit stupid, for example, achieving some of the higher tiers in the newest game mode, aether raids, doesn't mean so much when people are doing it just by exploiting scoring mechanisms that can be bought easily enough and which have nothing to do with being good at the game. The decision makers are clearly interested in money first and good game second if not worse. And for the amount of money they make, the amount of good content is ridiculous. For November, October, and arguably most of September the only notable additions were abyssal difficulty maps, which were just idiotic versions of lower difficulties in which enemies had so much stat inflation that matchups which are normally super-overkill in favour of one side turned into draws or even losses. There are also some significant balance issues in the PvP meta due to certain disgusting units released in the last few months (Veronica and Surtr being two of the most obvious examples), and for the moment the rebalancing mechanisms they're introducing are too specific or niche and not sufficiently available (i.e. stuck behind paywall) to really scare people who want to abuse units who reduce the game to stupid mode. Also, the rebalancing mechanisms are coming really slowly. I'm expecting a long time before the meta doesn't look disgusting. All of that to say that you're dealing with scoundrels of game makers who will repeatedly frustrate you with disgusting nonsense.

If you decide to join anyways, I can give you tips on what to do and what not to do as a new player.