[ehnto]

I agree, I thought learning spoken phrases would be the way to go when I first visited, and it certainly helped with the basic stuff like restaurants and saying please/thankyou.

But knowing how to read the alphabets would have helped a lot more, because there are so many very understandable things sitting right infront of you if only you knew how to read the characters. コンビニエンス seems impenetrable if you don't know the alphabet, but it's just the adapted word for "Convenience": Konbiniensu.

Duolingo copped a lot of flack here in a recent thread, but it was great for initially learning the alphabets, it took nearly no time to memorize Katakana and Hiragana. If you don't know the alphabet you can't even begin to try and learn the language in situ, so that's step one and a huge help when travelling.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Minor nit: the kana are not alphabets, they're syllabaries. Each character represents a complete syllable (except ン/ん) as opposed to representing a consonant or vowel sound.

They are really straight-forward to learn as, unlike in English, they don't have di and trigraphs and extremely few pronunciation exceptions. Learning the characters can be done in an afternoon, though of course being able to read them quickly will take quite a bit of practice.

[pezezin]

Both kanas definitely have digraphs, they are called yōon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%8Don

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Oh right, I forgot about those. They're really so straight-forward though that they barely count, in my opinion.

[ehnto]

That makes sense! Not having variations based on neighbors is a very nice simplicity to have, except for the lengthening and doubling symbols.