If I want to watch a drama that takes place during the early Edo Period for example without dictionary diving hell and the characters bust out some of that old Japanese, what are some common words (and maybe grammar, but mostly words) that I may come across? I already know 我 and ending sentences with ぬ instead of ない.
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祇園精舎、諸行無常、沙羅双樹、盛者必衰
if you don’t know why these, you’re not ready for ye olde japanese
Japanese people also struggle to understand old Japanese. I’ve never watched any historical dramas, but my understanding is that they don’t speak historical Japanese. They speak a modified version that has historical flavor while still being accessible to a modern audience. It’s the same in English really. We just throw in some “thee” and “thy” rather than going full Shakespearian. You won’t need to do the same level of prep work as you would to, say, read real Edo period literature or anything
Classical Japanese is what you’re really asking about. And for 我 and ぬ I’d really call those remnants of classical Japanese that still exist in modern Japanese. What you’re referring to in the Edo Period would also be Early Modern Japanese.
Old Japanese however is much older than the Edo period and mostly predates written Japanese, existing until the Nara period with books like the Kojiki, Nihon Shoki and Manyoshu.
hard to say what you’ll come across. it’s similar to modern Japanese with some differences. You might hear かわや for bathroom. I would say this question is too broad
Many (not all) of these old words aren’t used today because they’re offensive. If you watch something like “Lone Wolf & Cub”, they’ll use words such as めくら, 気違い, かたわ, etc. If you’re wondering, these mean blind, crazy, and cripple, respectively.
Honestly, the Japanese spoken during the Edo period isn’t THAT different from the standard language spoken today. As in, any native speaker wouldn’t have a hard time understanding what’s being said here [in this video](https://youtu.be/_p4u4m0eVgY).
Also, when was the drama in question made? If it were made in say, the 1970s, then it’d still use the aforementioned offensive vocabularies. Nowadays, even NHK period dramas use more or less a dumbed down version of the language so the modern audience could understand it. Think of a Shakespeare play, but using the modern, translated lines from No Fear Shakespeare.