Help with next steps…

TL;DR: I know kana, \~300 kanji, and basic grammar stuff. Currently using Duolingo, Lingo Deer and Wanikani. Looking for additional tips and resources to expand vocabulary and improve reading and forming sentences and add more kanji before my trip a little over a year from now. Stuff I can learn from my phone a plus. Thanks.

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I’m going on a trip to Japan next year and I want to try and brush up before I go. I’ve been learning off and on for a while.

* Took 2 years in college
* Add completed Duolingo and Lingo Deer (though looks like they’ve added a bunch since I last used it).
* Been working my way through Wanikani (\~300 burned)

I’m going to be going back through Duolingo and Lingo Deer (both in kana/kanji only), as well as going through the additional courses. I know some people don’t like it, but since it is on my phone, it is handy to squeeze in whenever I have a little downtime. I’m also going to keep working my way through Wanikani until I have everything burned.

From my lessons in college, I fully know my hiragana and katakana and I think I have a decent grasp on most (at least the basic) grammatical constructs (conjugation, particles, sentence structure, etc.) and don’t have much trouble forming sentences when given time and a dictionary.

I think my biggest problem right now (at least that I want to work on) is increasing my vocabulary (I know enough I could probably get by as a tourist, but I couldn’t hold a decent conversation) as well as just working on reading, forming, and understanding sentences more quickly. Additionally, I want to expand my recognition of kanji.

As I said, I’ll be reviewing and then continuing Duolingo, Lingo Deer and Wanikani.

I was also planning to find easy Japanese short stories that I could read and work through to hopefully pick up more vocabulary and get more practice reading complete sentences.

**Does anyone have any good sources for stories like these? I didn’t see any listed in the Starter Guide. If there happens to be any apps (or mobile-friendly websites) that let me do that, that’d also be fantastic (as I could use that on-the-go).**

**Any book recommendations for either vocabulary or really simple (\~1-2nd grade) stories and/or lists of important words to memorize would be great as well.**

(Relevant books already in my library are “A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar” by Seiichi Makino and Michio Tsutsui and “Barron’s 501 Japanese Verbs”.)

Obviously, I can’t go from my current level to master of Japanese in a year. My goal is to basically just be able to be a better tourist and hold basic conversations with people at this point, and hopefully navigate streets at least a little bit without constantly having to Google Translate sign names. I plan to study relatively intensely until then (hopefully averaging at least 1 hour a day, if not 2-3).

Hopefully my conversations can be more in-depth than “ぼくの名前はsamanimeです。トイレはどこですか？” =p

Thanks.