I highly suggest your dived into watching as much context in Japanese as you can: you currently have no access to practicing language daily in a mundane environment, so use Japanese content to increase your language skills (ex: films, shows, YouTube videos, etc, etc). I believe the wiki here has a lot of recommendations, if not – just Google search it.
As soon as you get to Japan – be a madman and just talk Japanese as much as you can with anyone around, use _any_ opportunity. A month or two and you’ll feel fluent enough to be confident.
I wish you good luck with your journey!
[deleted]
the apps i can reccomend, from experience: hellotalk, mondly japanese, and rosetta stone. mondly and rosetta both cost money but its HIGHLY worth it imo!
Ok, first don’t panic. You handled a move to France, so you can handle a move to Japan.
Do you know what you’ll be doing for school? I imagine international school since you’re not as worried about reading and writing? If you just need Japanese for daily life, you’d be surprised by how far you can get with relatively limited Japanese. That’s not to say you shouldn’t try to improve, but more to say that you shouldn’t panic. You’ll be fine at your level.
I think you’re leaving a major resource on the table by not practicing with your dad. You say you’re too nervous to talk to him, but if you can’t talk to your father, how will you be able to talk to strangers in Japan. I recommend viewing this as your first challenge and work up the courage to talk to your dad.
From there I think working with a tutor on iTalki is a good idea. Get a professional tutor who will teach you as well as just being a conversation partner.
I moved to rural Japan by myself, speaking 0 Japanese, so I get the stress. But, you can speak some Japanese already and are going with your family. Plus you’ve already managed to adapt to a new country and language once. You can do it again. You can do this. It’ll all work out in the end.
You can try watching Youtube. Honestly it’s the best chance you got to learn fast. With 7 months, just a few hours a day and you can get there for sure.
You can do language reactor or morphman + youtube. I watch a lot of youtube and that helped me improve my speaking. Try to do 1 video a day multiple times and really understand what they say, then you can watch a few videos just casually to get the flow of the language.
I built an app to learn from Youtube videos also called [immersely](https://immersely.app/)
If you are moving here permanently, why study? You now have the opportunity a lifetime to make friends, watch TV, go on dates, read magazines on the cheap, and learn naturally! What an awesome opportunity. Stop “studying” and start “learning!” おめでとうございます㊗️
Tae Kim’s grammar guide is what I used to learn grammar. It’s comprehensive and I just kept coming back to certain parts and applied them to sentences that I encountered.
Well Genki is a beginner textbook so it’s a bit bland and boring, but this is not a dopamin quest it’s laying the foundations for your life from now on. You will feel like an idiot and need to internalise a lot of really basic stuff but you can’t get away from that. Also, there’s nothing comfortable about learning Japanese, especially as you will be hit in the face with it very soon.
Also don’t neglect reading if you want to be able to communicate like an adult.
You’ve mentioned your family has to go here for your granny, so I’m wondering why not try to practice Japanese conversation with her online?
Even though I live here for years, sometimes I still have difficulty talking particularly with younger Japanese as they tend to use slang often, talk faster and have less structure with their sentences grammar-wise. However, when I volunteered in a nearby nursing home (before pandemic), I was able to practice my Japanese better as elderly Japanese tend to adjust to slower conversation, use Japanese closer to the one we learn from textbooks in vocabulary and grammar. Plus, the topic tends to be the common and sometimes even mundane things and repetitive as I visited weekly. This might sound boring if you’re talking with a friend but great when you want to practice with a real person and not apps or videos as you’ll be more familiar with not only the actual words that are used in the place you’re moving but also how they are used in conversation naturally.
Although there are some problems as some of them spoke in local dialect, while others have hearing problems. But overall it’s a great experience. If you’re moving here for your granny, I highly suggest to talk with her regularly! 頑張れ〜
Get a tutor (paid) 1:1 lessons and do as many as you can a week plus homework. Tell them you want to prio speaking over writing (although I’d recommend you learn via text book).
It sounds like you have some Japanese family and potential exposure so utilise that too where you can.
Anecdotally I’ve started from 0 at the start of Covid. Taught myself hiragana and katakana and then started 40min lessons once a week in October 2020. I’m currently on chapter 18/25 of Minna No Nihongo and recently increased my lessons to 80mins once a week. I do an hour of Japanese a day and am 49 years old.
If your young you’ll likely find it’s much faster ha ha but it will depend on how much you put in.
My tips are
Make physical flash cards for each word you learn. English on one side and Japanese on the other. As you learn conjugations eg Te form and Nai form add them to the Japanese side. Carry them with you and shuffle and test. It’s old school but I find it way better than apps as I can remix and retest quickly. I also put my wrong answers into a separate pile, shuffle and retest them first until that pile is 0 then shuffle all back and retest the full pile. I read the English side and then say out loud the Japanese word so I get reading and spoken practice.
Also the app Hello Talk is super good. I recently installed that and now chat via text to a few Japanese folk. You can also use it for voice calls.
After you arrive in Japan, your local city might have a free class for foreigners.
Look, I know, I know, this is subpar quality run by volunteers, I know. (I get lots of downvotes whenever I say this.) However, what we’re looking for here is not the lesson, but the people you get to talk to. If you join a class like this, you will soon make friends with Japanese volunteers who want to talk to foreigners. You can talk to them outside class hours. Some might even want to help you with things.
It’s a valuable experience.
Also, when you go to a restaurant, order from an actual staff member if possible. Don’t just use the machines.
Before you go, you should take enough classes from your side so you will be able to:
* Write your own name in katakana * Read all hiragana and katakana perfectly, regardless of speed * Know (not necessarily write) about 300-400 kanji * Introduce yourself or tell a short story, maybe about one minute without too much fillers or pauses. * Have knowledge equivalent to N5 or N4 if possible * Can at least say some compound sentence. Speaking simple (non-compound) sentences all the time is very tiring for both the speaker and the listener. * Read most street and instruction signs in Japanese. If you speak with a Japanese teacher and tell them you want to learn to live in Japan, this can be one of the topics they teach. (My instructor once taught me about “telling directions and navigating the streets”, which was a very important skill.) * Play a simple video or board game in Japanese. * Read simple tweets in Japanese. * Listen and read the NHK Easy website without using automatic translators. * Understand Japanese-specific life skills, like going to an onsen, using the public transportation, booking a hotel, and so on. This may appear as part of reading exercises in your language class. Again, be sure to tell your teacher that your main goal is to live in Japan.
For some ASAP learning, grab yourself a copy of the book “Nihongo Fun & Easy.” That gets you skilled up on all sorts of daily need conversation with romaji (and kana). You can focus on the listening and speaking without intensive study.
After that, pop over to the “Irodori” site. This has first couple lessons in romaji but then its kana. Lots of listening/speaking and focuses on conversation for life and work. It’s developed by The Japan Foundation to get overseas workers up to N4 within a year for those trainee jobs.
Use Tandem and/or italki
You’re gunna be absolutely fine, it sounds like you’ve got this.
Okay, so I could go on and on about what you should do, but I’ll exercise some self control here and just give you one piece of advice. The one I think is the most important, and least likely to have been covered already:
Dive into the deep end of the pool asap. Use the resources you find on Reddit, and on the rest of the English language Internet, to work towards an intermediate goal: the ability to use Japanese only resources to study Japanese. Because, in the end, that’s what it comes down to. That’s the difference between perennial learners, and people who actually end up speaking Japanese: the latter category cuts off the English language materials which “explain” Japanese instead of immersing you in it, and goes all in on actual, native Japanese.
You’ve got seven months, so cut that into two pieces, and set this deep dive as your intermediate goal, for 4 months from now. That means you should spend the next four months gradually switching to Japanese only resources. Cut your reliance on the English language down, bit by bit. In July, spend 10% of your time using Japanese only resources. In August, 30%. And so on, with 4 months as the hard deadline. No life jacket, no floating devices, no lifeguard. You dive into the deep and, and you swim or sink, no matter what. You move onto the Japanese language Internet, and cut yourself off completely from this side, that we’re on now.
And I mean ENTIRELY cut off. No youtube (or, at least, you tell it that you’re in Japan, and you aren’t interested in anything that’s not in Japanese), no Reddit, not English news, no Netflix, nothing. If you want news, entertainment, social media, etc. … Japan has all of those.
That gives you three months of still living in France, to get acclimated to living in the deep end. Then, when you land in Japan, you’ll already be comfortable with the notion of being surrounded by Japanese, with no English explanations and crutches to lean on. And, eventually, once you’re fluent in Japanese, you can come back to us as a triumphant conqueror, and tell us how it all went.
A resource you can start using pretty much right away, just to get you started. Then, you can search for more stuff on your own, on Japanese search sites:
A word of warning: a lot of Japanese sites are switching, or have switched already, to a policy of blocking Europe. Yahoo Japan is the latest, I just noticed. That’s because of the costly and mostly pointless regulations the EU has on websites. So you will need some kind of VPN, to be able to surf the Japanese Internet from France. There are some free options, I think, but the paid ones are cheap and probably easier to set up.
P.S. There are tools to help you read Japanese without knowing Kanji (by adding furigana). So don’t worry about that, you don’t need to learn Kanji to get by in Japanese.
Nothing you watch now is going to be as useful as being in Japan, and you have the basics so do the one thing you can usefully do on your own: Learn the Kanji.
Everything else is better studied in country, but Kanji study is always a monk’s work, and it would truly be a waste of an opportunity to study Kanji when you could be out talking to Japanese people when you are actually living in Japan.
Learn 2000+ Kanji, which can be done in a month or so with concentration. Without knowing Kanji, you cannot read native materials, and you cannot use subtitles in country.
You can learn 2000+ Kanji by August 1st. RTK (the book)+ Kanji.koohii.com+ concentration= 2000+ Kanji by August 1st.
No other study you can do now will make as big a difference, and no matter what other study you do now, you will be lost for the first couple months in Japan.
Other people have covered strategies, so I’ll mention a useful mindset: the biggest thing that helped me is being willing to fail. I never learned so quickly as when I tried to do something and crashed and burned—it sears the memory into your brain and forces you to improve. Don’t be afraid to talk to people, even if you’re barely able to pronounce anything, since if you’re not pushing yourself, you won’t grow.
You are so lucky to have lived in France and soon be living in Japan. It is an awesome country and incorporates some of the best parts of French living.
1. If you can get a daily speaking tutor, that would be helpful. In person would be the very best but that is probably not so easy for the global pandemic, your tight timeline, & summer vacations.
– Look for free “language exchange” where 50% is Japanese & 50% is English/French. This is relatively inefficient.
– There are some fantastic language universities & schools in France; you might find a visiting Japanese tutor to meet in person.
2. Audio-only is more efficient than video for improving listening skills. Videos give too much away with the moving pictures; there are fewer words per minute and limited vocabulary / grammar. The brain needs to concentrate & work much harder with audio-only.
3. Once you are settled in Japan, consider getting involved in local clubs and schools. If you are considering western university, an international high school might be helpful but I don’t have a clue; that is something to think about and discuss with your parents (and maybe a university admissions counselor).
BTW – My speaking skills skyrocketed once I put myself in Japanese only situations that forced me to communicate only in Japanese (for me that was moving to a sharehouse with 100% Japanese residents); that was an incredibly stressful first month or two. Incredible experience after that.
I know you said writing can come later, but I would encourage you to learn hiragana before you get to Japan, if at all possible.
You don’t have to learn how to physically write the characters from scratch, but it will greatly benefit your speaking skills to be able to recognize hiragana well enough to type it and read it on a phone.
Speaking and writing will complement each other as you make friends. When I studied abroad in Japan, I would work on my speaking flow and confidence simply by daily living, but it was actually the evenings and weekends texting friends on my phone that gave me the time to think through sentence structures and try out grammar I wasn’t comfortable with. New grammatical structures that I learned from slowly thinking and texting, I could then insert into my speech the following days, which slowly expanded my speaking skills.
So I’d definitely try and make friends and communicate with them by text early on once you get to Japan. It’s both going to really help your language skills, and it’s also going to help you acclimate to Japanese society and feel more comfortable. It’s also nice to have a native Japanese person available to ask cultural questions.
Relax. It’s going to be fine.
In my opinion, this is the best Japanese guide out there and gives you everything you need to do in order to achieve your goals in Japanese and best of all, everything that it suggests is free: https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/
I would highly recommend getting a dictionary app for looking up unfamiliar words. On iOS I really like Midori, but there are plenty of dictionary apps you can use.
Seven months is ample time to prepare. You won’t become fluent by then, but if you put in the work, you’ll have a solid base to operate from once you arrive in the country. From there, the first six months or so will be a big learning curve, but forcing yourself into situations where you’ll need to speak Japanese will be the key to developing solid skills. There will be awkward, confusing exchanges – there’s no way to avoid that – but before you know it you’ll have adapted, and daily interactions will start to seem effortless. Good luck, and 頑張って！
Get language partners and native conversation partners that don’t speak English. For instance, I like to play games like Apex with Japanese friends, you can use a VPN to queue into Japan servers
I enjoyed Duolingo app for Japanese but it is more for learning basic words and phrases . It does ask you recall questions and it gets boring after a month or so but it will help memorize some simple words and phrases . Also if you can find someone who is learning Japanese also then some basic verbal practice with another person will help some. As for writing there are a few workbooks on Amazon that helped me. There are also Japanese conversation practice apps available for download on aptoide , if you install aptoide to your phone then you can try the other apps. I hope something here is of help to you. 👍🏻
25 comments
I highly suggest your dived into watching as much context in Japanese as you can: you currently have no access to practicing language daily in a mundane environment, so use Japanese content to increase your language skills (ex: films, shows, YouTube videos, etc, etc). I believe the wiki here has a lot of recommendations, if not – just Google search it.
As soon as you get to Japan – be a madman and just talk Japanese as much as you can with anyone around, use _any_ opportunity. A month or two and you’ll feel fluent enough to be confident.
I wish you good luck with your journey!
[deleted]
the apps i can reccomend, from experience: hellotalk, mondly japanese, and rosetta stone. mondly and rosetta both cost money but its HIGHLY worth it imo!
Ok, first don’t panic. You handled a move to France, so you can handle a move to Japan.
Do you know what you’ll be doing for school? I imagine international school since you’re not as worried about reading and writing? If you just need Japanese for daily life, you’d be surprised by how far you can get with relatively limited Japanese. That’s not to say you shouldn’t try to improve, but more to say that you shouldn’t panic. You’ll be fine at your level.
I think you’re leaving a major resource on the table by not practicing with your dad. You say you’re too nervous to talk to him, but if you can’t talk to your father, how will you be able to talk to strangers in Japan. I recommend viewing this as your first challenge and work up the courage to talk to your dad.
From there I think working with a tutor on iTalki is a good idea. Get a professional tutor who will teach you as well as just being a conversation partner.
I moved to rural Japan by myself, speaking 0 Japanese, so I get the stress. But, you can speak some Japanese already and are going with your family. Plus you’ve already managed to adapt to a new country and language once. You can do it again. You can do this. It’ll all work out in the end.
You can try watching Youtube. Honestly it’s the best chance you got to learn fast. With 7 months, just a few hours a day and you can get there for sure.
You can do language reactor or morphman + youtube. I watch a lot of youtube and that helped me improve my speaking. Try to do 1 video a day multiple times and really understand what they say, then you can watch a few videos just casually to get the flow of the language.
I built an app to learn from Youtube videos also called [immersely](https://immersely.app/)
If you are moving here permanently, why study? You now have the opportunity a lifetime to make friends, watch TV, go on dates, read magazines on the cheap, and learn naturally! What an awesome opportunity. Stop “studying” and start “learning!” おめでとうございます㊗️
Check me out at Nantucket language school. http://www.nantucketlanguageschool.com. I’ve walked dozens of people from zero to conversational.
Tae Kim’s grammar guide is what I used to learn grammar. It’s comprehensive and I just kept coming back to certain parts and applied them to sentences that I encountered.
Well Genki is a beginner textbook so it’s a bit bland and boring, but this is not a dopamin quest it’s laying the foundations for your life from now on. You will feel like an idiot and need to internalise a lot of really basic stuff but you can’t get away from that. Also, there’s nothing comfortable about learning Japanese, especially as you will be hit in the face with it very soon.
Also don’t neglect reading if you want to be able to communicate like an adult.
You’ve mentioned your family has to go here for your granny, so I’m wondering why not try to practice Japanese conversation with her online?
Even though I live here for years, sometimes I still have difficulty talking particularly with younger Japanese as they tend to use slang often, talk faster and have less structure with their sentences grammar-wise. However, when I volunteered in a nearby nursing home (before pandemic), I was able to practice my Japanese better as elderly Japanese tend to adjust to slower conversation, use Japanese closer to the one we learn from textbooks in vocabulary and grammar. Plus, the topic tends to be the common and sometimes even mundane things and repetitive as I visited weekly. This might sound boring if you’re talking with a friend but great when you want to practice with a real person and not apps or videos as you’ll be more familiar with not only the actual words that are used in the place you’re moving but also how they are used in conversation naturally.
Although there are some problems as some of them spoke in local dialect, while others have hearing problems. But overall it’s a great experience. If you’re moving here for your granny, I highly suggest to talk with her regularly! 頑張れ〜
If you want to learn kanji and vocabulary you can try [Wanikani](https://www.wanikani.com/).
Get a tutor (paid) 1:1 lessons and do as many as you can a week plus homework. Tell them you want to prio speaking over writing (although I’d recommend you learn via text book).
It sounds like you have some Japanese family and potential exposure so utilise that too where you can.
Anecdotally I’ve started from 0 at the start of Covid. Taught myself hiragana and katakana and then started 40min lessons once a week in October 2020. I’m currently on chapter 18/25 of Minna No Nihongo and recently increased my lessons to 80mins once a week. I do an hour of Japanese a day and am 49 years old.
If your young you’ll likely find it’s much faster ha ha but it will depend on how much you put in.
My tips are
Make physical flash cards for each word you learn. English on one side and Japanese on the other. As you learn conjugations eg Te form and Nai form add them to the Japanese side. Carry them with you and shuffle and test. It’s old school but I find it way better than apps as I can remix and retest quickly. I also put my wrong answers into a separate pile, shuffle and retest them first until that pile is 0 then shuffle all back and retest the full pile. I read the English side and then say out loud the Japanese word so I get reading and spoken practice.
Also the app Hello Talk is super good. I recently installed that and now chat via text to a few Japanese folk. You can also use it for voice calls.
After you arrive in Japan, your local city might have a free class for foreigners.
Look, I know, I know, this is subpar quality run by volunteers, I know. (I get lots of downvotes whenever I say this.) However, what we’re looking for here is not the lesson, but the people you get to talk to. If you join a class like this, you will soon make friends with Japanese volunteers who want to talk to foreigners. You can talk to them outside class hours. Some might even want to help you with things.
It’s a valuable experience.
Also, when you go to a restaurant, order from an actual staff member if possible. Don’t just use the machines.
Before you go, you should take enough classes from your side so you will be able to:
* Write your own name in katakana
* Read all hiragana and katakana perfectly, regardless of speed
* Know (not necessarily write) about 300-400 kanji
* Introduce yourself or tell a short story, maybe about one minute without too much fillers or pauses.
* Have knowledge equivalent to N5 or N4 if possible
* Can at least say some compound sentence. Speaking simple (non-compound) sentences all the time is very tiring for both the speaker and the listener.
* Read most street and instruction signs in Japanese. If you speak with a Japanese teacher and tell them you want to learn to live in Japan, this can be one of the topics they teach. (My instructor once taught me about “telling directions and navigating the streets”, which was a very important skill.)
* Play a simple video or board game in Japanese.
* Read simple tweets in Japanese.
* Listen and read the NHK Easy website without using automatic translators.
* Understand Japanese-specific life skills, like going to an onsen, using the public transportation, booking a hotel, and so on. This may appear as part of reading exercises in your language class. Again, be sure to tell your teacher that your main goal is to live in Japan.
For some ASAP learning, grab yourself a copy of the book “Nihongo Fun & Easy.” That gets you skilled up on all sorts of daily need conversation with romaji (and kana). You can focus on the listening and speaking without intensive study.
After that, pop over to the “Irodori” site. This has first couple lessons in romaji but then its kana. Lots of listening/speaking and focuses on conversation for life and work. It’s developed by The Japan Foundation to get overseas workers up to N4 within a year for those trainee jobs.
Use Tandem and/or italki
You’re gunna be absolutely fine, it sounds like you’ve got this.
Okay, so I could go on and on about what you should do, but I’ll exercise some self control here and just give you one piece of advice. The one I think is the most important, and least likely to have been covered already:
Dive into the deep end of the pool asap. Use the resources you find on Reddit, and on the rest of the English language Internet, to work towards an intermediate goal: the ability to use Japanese only resources to study Japanese. Because, in the end, that’s what it comes down to. That’s the difference between perennial learners, and people who actually end up speaking Japanese: the latter category cuts off the English language materials which “explain” Japanese instead of immersing you in it, and goes all in on actual, native Japanese.
You’ve got seven months, so cut that into two pieces, and set this deep dive as your intermediate goal, for 4 months from now. That means you should spend the next four months gradually switching to Japanese only resources. Cut your reliance on the English language down, bit by bit. In July, spend 10% of your time using Japanese only resources. In August, 30%. And so on, with 4 months as the hard deadline. No life jacket, no floating devices, no lifeguard. You dive into the deep and, and you swim or sink, no matter what. You move onto the Japanese language Internet, and cut yourself off completely from this side, that we’re on now.
And I mean ENTIRELY cut off. No youtube (or, at least, you tell it that you’re in Japan, and you aren’t interested in anything that’s not in Japanese), no Reddit, not English news, no Netflix, nothing. If you want news, entertainment, social media, etc. … Japan has all of those.
That gives you three months of still living in France, to get acclimated to living in the deep end. Then, when you land in Japan, you’ll already be comfortable with the notion of being surrounded by Japanese, with no English explanations and crutches to lean on. And, eventually, once you’re fluent in Japanese, you can come back to us as a triumphant conqueror, and tell us how it all went.
A resource you can start using pretty much right away, just to get you started. Then, you can search for more stuff on your own, on Japanese search sites:
[https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/](https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/)
A word of warning: a lot of Japanese sites are switching, or have switched already, to a policy of blocking Europe. Yahoo Japan is the latest, I just noticed. That’s because of the costly and mostly pointless regulations the EU has on websites. So you will need some kind of VPN, to be able to surf the Japanese Internet from France. There are some free options, I think, but the paid ones are cheap and probably easier to set up.
P.S. There are tools to help you read Japanese without knowing Kanji (by adding furigana). So don’t worry about that, you don’t need to learn Kanji to get by in Japanese.
Nothing you watch now is going to be as useful as being in Japan, and you have the basics so do the one thing you can usefully do on your own: Learn the Kanji.
Everything else is better studied in country, but Kanji study is always a monk’s work, and it would truly be a waste of an opportunity to study Kanji when you could be out talking to Japanese people when you are actually living in Japan.
Learn 2000+ Kanji, which can be done in a month or so with concentration. Without knowing Kanji, you cannot read native materials, and you cannot use subtitles in country.
You can learn 2000+ Kanji by August 1st. RTK (the book)+ Kanji.koohii.com+ concentration= 2000+ Kanji by August 1st.
No other study you can do now will make as big a difference, and no matter what other study you do now, you will be lost for the first couple months in Japan.
Other people have covered strategies, so I’ll mention a useful mindset: the biggest thing that helped me is being willing to fail. I never learned so quickly as when I tried to do something and crashed and burned—it sears the memory into your brain and forces you to improve. Don’t be afraid to talk to people, even if you’re barely able to pronounce anything, since if you’re not pushing yourself, you won’t grow.
You are so lucky to have lived in France and soon be living in Japan. It is an awesome country and incorporates some of the best parts of French living.
1. If you can get a daily speaking tutor, that would be helpful. In person would be the very best but that is probably not so easy for the global pandemic, your tight timeline, & summer vacations.
– Look for free “language exchange” where 50% is Japanese & 50% is English/French. This is relatively inefficient.
– There are some fantastic language universities & schools in France; you might find a visiting Japanese tutor to meet in person.
2. Audio-only is more efficient than video for improving listening skills. Videos give too much away with the moving pictures; there are fewer words per minute and limited vocabulary / grammar. The brain needs to concentrate & work much harder with audio-only.
3. Once you are settled in Japan, consider getting involved in local clubs and schools. If you are considering western university, an international high school might be helpful but I don’t have a clue; that is something to think about and discuss with your parents (and maybe a university admissions counselor).
BTW – My speaking skills skyrocketed once I put myself in Japanese only situations that forced me to communicate only in Japanese (for me that was moving to a sharehouse with 100% Japanese residents); that was an incredibly stressful first month or two. Incredible experience after that.
I know you said writing can come later, but I would encourage you to learn hiragana before you get to Japan, if at all possible.
You don’t have to learn how to physically write the characters from scratch, but it will greatly benefit your speaking skills to be able to recognize hiragana well enough to type it and read it on a phone.
Speaking and writing will complement each other as you make friends. When I studied abroad in Japan, I would work on my speaking flow and confidence simply by daily living, but it was actually the evenings and weekends texting friends on my phone that gave me the time to think through sentence structures and try out grammar I wasn’t comfortable with. New grammatical structures that I learned from slowly thinking and texting, I could then insert into my speech the following days, which slowly expanded my speaking skills.
So I’d definitely try and make friends and communicate with them by text early on once you get to Japan. It’s both going to really help your language skills, and it’s also going to help you acclimate to Japanese society and feel more comfortable. It’s also nice to have a native Japanese person available to ask cultural questions.
Relax. It’s going to be fine.
In my opinion, this is the best Japanese guide out there and gives you everything you need to do in order to achieve your goals in Japanese and best of all, everything that it suggests is free: https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/
I would highly recommend getting a dictionary app for looking up unfamiliar words. On iOS I really like Midori, but there are plenty of dictionary apps you can use.
Seven months is ample time to prepare. You won’t become fluent by then, but if you put in the work, you’ll have a solid base to operate from once you arrive in the country. From there, the first six months or so will be a big learning curve, but forcing yourself into situations where you’ll need to speak Japanese will be the key to developing solid skills. There will be awkward, confusing exchanges – there’s no way to avoid that – but before you know it you’ll have adapted, and daily interactions will start to seem effortless. Good luck, and 頑張って！
Get language partners and native conversation partners that don’t speak English. For instance, I like to play games like Apex with Japanese friends, you can use a VPN to queue into Japan servers
I enjoyed Duolingo app for Japanese but it is more for learning basic words and phrases . It does ask you recall questions and it gets boring after a month or so but it will help memorize some simple words and phrases . Also if you can find someone who is learning Japanese also then some basic verbal practice with another person will help some. As for writing there are a few workbooks on Amazon that helped me. There are also Japanese conversation practice apps available for download on aptoide , if you install aptoide to your phone then you can try the other apps. I hope something here is of help to you. 👍🏻