I'm a casual tourist, who likes to pick up some rudimentary language skills before travel. There are many of us; we understand the importance of smiling at our hosts and getting the words out while more formal learners are stalled in self-induced aphasia.
For us, the design of spaced-repetition systems misses a crucial point: We don't care about measurable process while stockpiling some language skills before a trip, and we certainly don't have time to sit around studying once we're on a trip. The goal is to ingest as much content as we can, in some form that sticks, to recall more flexibly as we struggle to speak in-country.
For this purpose, memorizing a radio play as if one is an actor is more effective than spaced repetition. For example, just the Pimsleur dialogs, edited from audio files one owns. The words are there, slow to access but quicker than opening up a phrase book. Within a week traveling, one's mind reorganizes access to the language one actually uses.
The dig on learning a radio play is one doesn't know the words out of sequence. Yeah, that's why one can learn them so efficiently. For those of us of a certain age, it's the "next song on the album" effect. What did Knuth say about premature optimization? Learn the words one actually needs out of sequence, on the ground, in use.