I took two years of Spanish in high school and retained approximately the ability to ask where the library is, which has never once come up on any trip I've taken as an adult. Before a recent trip to Mexico, I wanted more than just being able to say hello and order a beer.
What actually helped was having full conversations with an AI chatbot in Spanish about the specific situations I knew I'd be in — checking into a hotel, ordering at a restaurant, asking for directions, a little small talk with a cab driver. I'd write in Spanish as best I could, it would gently correct me and explain the fix, and then we'd keep the conversation going instead of me just memorizing a vocabulary list.
The part that helped most was asking it to slow down and use simpler words when I got lost, the same way a patient person would if you told them you're still learning, instead of the app experience of just marking an answer wrong and moving on. I could ask it to explain why a particular word was wrong, which stuck a lot better than a red X ever did.
By the trip, I wasn't fluent by any stretch, but I could actually hold a short real conversation instead of just pointing at a menu and hoping. That's a low bar, but it's a much better bar than where I started, and it cost me nothing but the time I put into practicing.
This works for any language you're trying to pick up a little of before a trip — the trick is practicing the specific conversations you'll actually have, not a random vocabulary list that has nothing to do with your actual itinerary.
If you want the slow, no-jargon version of all this — the stuff I wish someone had handed me before I fumbled through it myself — that's exactly what I built On Ramp AI for. Check it out here.