I lived there a couple years, if all else fails there is an even higher rate of understanding written English than spoken. In the two years I was there I never felt like I was in a situation ever I needed to know how to read or speak the language(s) even though I did make an effort.

My first experience was having to get from the airport to a hotel in Tokyo to stay the night. A gentleman outside the airport helped show me how the buses worked (those drivers are crazy) and when I got to the hotel counter the gal pulled out a pen and paper since I only knew English and we wrote back and forth to each other. After that my concern over getting lost went away, everyone was really friendly and helpful in my experience.

Yeah after years living here I'm finally trying to learn how to actually read, but I gotta say that memorizing a thousand kanji and still barely being able to read shit is pretty discouraging.

I've been practicing that alphabet for over a year. I still see some of them, and my mind just blanks. It's fun, though, slowly understanding more as time goes on.

It's surprisingly doable. If you have a free weekend you can learn all of them. Even one day may be enough if you are dedicated and a quick learner. Of course, repetition is a must if you don't want to forget them again, but the initial investment is really not that big.

https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/

This resource suggests mnemonics which are surprisingly effective. They teach hiragana first, but it's not a hard requirement if you want to learn katakana exclusively.

The u is pronounced, but it's a shorter sound than English u. Vowels in Japanese are shorter than English ones, which makes sense for a language where vowel length matters, eg su (vinegar) is a different word than suu (to smoke).

I'm trying to think of a word that wouldn't use u as an insert between 2 English consonants, like trip becomes torippu, but that's probably because they wanted to avoid tsurippu, as you mentioned about tsu. One word is garasu meaning glass (the material), but they also have gurasu, meaning drinking glass.

Most words do tend to use the u between English consonants though (supo-tsu, purezento, surippa, sute-ki, etc).

The kana alphabets were (probably) borrowed from Pali, and syllables follow the structure (consonant + vowel) or (vowel). In other words, a consonant must not, grammatically, occur alone. I don't know if Japanese still retains this as an explicit rule, but this is why you see the -u ending. It may or may not be pronounced, depending on which way flows better.

Many other languages with Pali / Sanskrit heritage have similar behaviour. However, Sanskrit itself and some modern languages have a dedicated character called a 'viraama', which says 'this consonant has no following vowel'. For example, in the word 'Padma' (lotus), the d is followed by a virama. Other languages, like Japanese, use 'u' instead of a dedicated viraama. So different languages in east, southeast and south Asia might write and say it as Padma, Paduma or Padama, but all versions would be mutually intelligible.