There's a date in the calendar. A holiday, a wedding, a visit to family, a work trip.
Between now and then is a fixed number of weeks, and it isn't going to increase. Worth doing the arithmetic rather than the usual thing, which is to think about it in March and panic in June.
What Can Realistically Be Built in the Time
Be concrete, because vague intentions are what fail here.
Making a phrase automatic takes days of repeated exposure, not weeks. A small set — the ordering, asking, buying and greeting exchanges that make up most of a trip — is a matter of a few songs, and those few cover a surprising proportion of everything you'll actually need to say.
So a couple of months of listening, in hours you already spend, gets you to the point where the routine exchanges come out without thought. That's a realistic target and it's most of the value.
What Won't Happen in the Time
Equally worth being honest about. You won't hold a long conversation. You won't follow a fast group discussion. Nobody gets there in eight weeks and no product should suggest otherwise.
The realistic outcome is that the transactional parts of the trip stop being stressful and start being ordinary. A large quality change and a small linguistic one.
Why the Two-Week Version Doesn't Work
Automatic speech is built by repetition spread across time. It's a physical process and it doesn't compress.
Cramming in the fortnight before produces phrases held consciously, retrievable in about three seconds, which collapse the moment somebody speaks at normal speed. You'll have done the work and got the version that doesn't function under pressure.
The same total effort spread across two months produces automatic phrases instead. Same hours, completely different result, and the only variable is when you start.
The Decision
It isn't whether to do it. It's whether to do it in a way that works — and that's determined entirely by the start date.
About Outputly
Outputly's first songs are the exchanges you'll actually use on a trip, and they run in hours you're already spending. Started now, they'll be automatic by the time you go.