Can anyone recommend travel/survival language resources? Or approaches to courses that will help learn these basics? Im about five months out from my first trip, thanks!
Vlog with EN and JP subtitles on youtube (both from foreigners and natives). You watch them, note the sentences, study them, shadow them then rince and repeat. The foreigner's vlogs will teach you what you need as a foreigner while the native's ones will teach you how natives interact with natives. Focusing on the pronounciation and just memorizing some key sentences is the best way to maximize those five months. Pay attention to how the full conversation goes too :3
There are ressources on the internet that can be useful but they usually won't teach everything you need. They also often planned for you far into the future with the assumption that you will have 1 year or more to prepare yourself. Just take a shorcut and learn what you need rather than what you should learn in the long-term. Studying like that is like studying the "compressed" version. It won't explain explain everything to you but you don't need to anyway. Also, if you pronounciation is not good enough or your grammar is awkward/clumsy, natives will struggle to understand you. So just "copy" how natives or fluent people speak. Focus on the situation rather than the details.
Also, after your trip to Japan, every successful conversation you had there will become an asset if you want to study Japanese more "properly" later. But in order to have successful conversation, you need good enough pronounciation and natural enough speech. And the "natural enough speech" part required too much time if you try to become good at everything (which is the goal of most ressources).
So, I would focus on that. Also, you can study kanji but it's not worth it with only 5 months. Just use an app if you really need to (you can draw the kanji on renshuu for example). 頑張ってね～
