Approaching in a new country with a language barrier

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I had been living in Japan for about 6 months at the time, and I had gone on a day trip to Kyoto. I was with a female and we entered a bar around 4 or 5pm. I ordered a Guinness for myself and a hard cider for her. The guy working at the bar was a white European probably in his late-30s. The girl I was with didn't speak English, and I communicated with her in hyper-rudimentary Japanese, but we managed. The bartender started speaking at me in fast Japanese. And he was obnoxious about it. It wasn't a scenario where he was trying to AMOG. He was essentially engaging in the typical foreigner dick-measuring contest of "My Japanese is better than yours." I couldn't understand what he was saying. And he said to me, "How are you learning Japanese right now." I said I was at a Japanese school and that I mostly studied at cafes. He said, "You're wasting your time. You need to join a baseball team or something." Apparently he had spent 6-12 months playing on a baseball team when he first came to Japan and had learned the language really well that way. He made the point that if I wasn't actually using the language, I was wasting my time. It must have been very satisfying for him. He sees me - this confident and cocky-appearing foreigner - come into the bar, and then he immediately makes it clear, "No, your Japanese sucks." I was really annoyed at the time. But the reason I remember this and am reflecting on it now is because he was right. His advice was the best I had received. I needed to *use* the language. And studying at cafes wasn't the ideal route. If you're of the academic mindset where you enjoy learning from the books, you will experience a rude-awakening after 12-15 months of living in your country of interest. I had written a long article back in 2017 on the benefits of language immersion. If you are considering moving to a new country, this article is a must-read. I've also written a book on Japanese daygame (link above). Even after a few more years of living in Japan (over 4.5 years at the time of this post), it's still the case that if I were to do the whole process over again (e.g., move to Korea and start again from the ground-up), I would over-index on *conversation* and essentially keep the academic/bookwork to a minimum. One might think that spending lots of time at cafes in order to assiduously learn the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary would ultimately help one with conversation in the long haul, but I cannot reiterate more that this is *not* the case. It sounds counterintuitive. But this is where real experience cannot be faked. Essentially I had moved to Japan and invested heavily into a "potential energy period," where I spent long hours learning Japanese from books and flashcards, thinking that this initial study period would ultimately propel me into a much better place with conversation later on - i.e., "I'm going to have to learn this stuff anyway, so I might as well get it out of the way now. And I'll be way better at conversation later because of it." But this couldn't be further from the truth. What I learned is that time spent on bookwork applies very very little to...

Full article: https://mikemehlman.net/2021/02/05/approaching-in-a-new-country-with-a-language-barrier