It looks like I might be going to Japan for a vacation in a few weeks. Starting from effectively nothing\*, if I wanted to learn some basic communication for travel, what would be the best use of 3-4 weeks of daily learning?
Thanks for any suggestions. 🙂
\*I’m fluent in English, and decent with Spanish and Latin, but I suspect those are mostly useless.
3 comments
There’s not much time, so your best bet might be to learn key “touristy” phrases and vocabulary to get to interesting places as well as to buy goods you want to take back home. Oh and also vocab and phrases about food!
Pimsluer seems to be designed for just this situation, if you can check it out digitally or on CD from your library, that would be great! Though you’ll learn how to say some phrases in japanese, but you might not understand how people answer you, because they don’t always use standard textbook answers.
I would also try to learn katakana (this will help reading menus) and hiragana.
Learn your way around all the features Google translate has to offer, including scanning and reading signs for you, get an offline dictionary app.
Read a book of tourist phrases or focus on planning the rest of your trip details. Realistically, you will not be reading or communicating in any practical capacity in only 3 weeks.