Hey everyone,

I've been a member here for a while and haven't posted very much, but I've got a quick question I'd love some help with.

Basically, I leave for a two-week trip to Japan in two days, and I'm wondering what sort of last-minute preparations you all would recommend for me. Some background on my Japanese ability: I did RTK years ago, fell behind on my reviews at some point, got about halfway through Genki 1, and quit. More recently, I've been studying Chinese in college. Once I found out I'd be going to Japan, though, I started studying Japanese as much as possible during my free time this summer in order to prepare. To give you a rough idea of my level:

Vocab/Grammar: I'm just shy of 2,000 cards through Nukemarine's wonderful Core 6k Optimized deck, and I got about halfway through the "Special Expressions" cards in the Tae Kim Anki deck before getting overwhelmed by 200-300 reviews from each deck per day and dropping the Tae Kim deck in favor of focusing on the Core 6k deck.

Listening/Speaking: I work part time and have been listening to Japanese audiobooks as much as possible at work (fortunately for my Japanese study, my job doesn't involve a whole lot of human interaction), and have noticed that over time I've begun to start understanding sentences more often instead of just words here and there. Also, I have some half-Japanese friends with whom I've been trying to speak as much as possible. My speaking is still probably the weakest of my (overall rather weak) skills, though.

Writing: I've done my best to write on Lang-8 this summer as frequently as possible (http://lang-8.com/62781 is my account if you'd like an idea of what my writing level is at).

Reading: I can basically understand the articles on NHK's Easy News site (with a dictionary either infrequently or very frequently depending on the topic of the article) and I'm still attempting to hack my way through a light novel I have called "涙空" (school setting, love story, etc.) with a dictionary.

Anyway, I'm just curious what advice you guys might have for me to prepare before I leave. Since I wouldn't say I'm a total beginner, I'm not quite sure a crash course in "survival Japanese" is what I need--however, I still feel like there must be more beneficial resources I can make use of to prepare in addition to studying Core vocab/trying to read & listen to as much Japanese as possible. While I think it's great that I can understand sentences like「海上で衝突事故が発生した」 and many more (extremely handy/useful in everyday life!) sentences/vocab/grammar thanks to Core 6k, I guess what I'm shooting for is feeling more secure with expressions/words I'll be using on a daily basis.

One last thing--does anyone have a resource to recommend for reading Japanese road/store/etc. signs? I speak a little Hebrew, and I found that one of the most frustrating Hebrew-related experiences I had while in Israel was that I was unprepared to read signs, which are literally staring you in the face (mocking your language ability) any time you are outside. I'm sure there are quite a few sign-related kanji/words that I haven't covered in Core yet, and since I'll literally be seeing signs in Japanese every day, I'd love to be able to read them!

Sorry for the super long post; I'd really appreciate some advice on this!
Thanks.

I've been living in japan for about a month and a half now....leaving soon. Anyway your here for 2 weeks, most likely a sightseeing trip in tokyo or something like that. You won't need a lot of japanese I reckon. Signs are in japanese and romaji. Really you could get by with basic phrases, besides big tour destinations the japanese want to improve their English pretty much no matter how good your japanese is. Right now I'm at Imabari, Ehime prefecture studying abroad and let me tell you, their English ability is really bad. They try to use it from time to time, but just resorts to japanese which is good for me. When I was in tokyo a couple years back, yeah English everywhere seriously. When I came I'm probably in between beginner and intermediate, but now id say my vocabulary raised expeditionally and listening improved alot. Reading speed also increased, but that's due to my 8 hr day study streak since I don't understand the class and have nothing to distract me really.

Lol sorry for talking about myself just had to put it out there. Overall, don't worry about your japanese unless your doing something rather unique requiring the language. Sightseeing in a big tourist destination? I think you know the answer.

Edit
Oh I'm sorry but I forgot to answer your true question. If you really want to learn more. I'm no pro in the language, but I recommend practicing listening to the ANSWERS they give you in japanese to the survival japanese phrases you may ask them, if of course it's not in English.

[RawToast]

If you pick up a $1 trial at japanesepod you could quickly run through all of the 'survival phrases' courses by listening to the dialog only -- then only listen to the full lesson if didn't understand the dialog.

Thanks for the replies! I'll be sure to check out the stuff at Japanesepod; thanks RawToast! And I appreciate the info, Xanpakuto, but I'm actually not going to be doing much sightseeing in a popular tourist destination. ^^;

For most of the two week period, I'm going to be in a rather small town in southern Japan helping teach English to middle/high school students. I won't be in Tokyo at all except for at the airport. Since some students might not have had a lot of English, I was really hoping that I'd be able to at least try to use Japanese to explain things.
Again, thanks for the replies!

If you consider that there are a lot of people who don't speak any Japanese and manage to spend their lives in Japan, you'll be alright.

Signs for stores aren't the easiest to read, especially if they are written in calligraphy and if they are names. For chain stores you get used to them, and for smaller stores they usually write a description somewhere, or you walk by and you see what it is.