[flurdy]

It is so often dismissed how important the second part is. Many think that just moving to a country is enough, and you will pick up the language. Maybe the basics, but not if you don't speak and think it 24/7, however uncomfortable that is at the start.

You see this clearly with the people who move with their family vs the single person. The family person will speak English or whatever their native language is at home every day, will never really speak fluently, whilst the single guy/girl will often become fluent very fast.

Though this also depends on who their new friends are, so if they only hang out with people from their home country or just groups of international friends who all speak English with each other, then that learning journey will take a lot longer.

This is hard, though. But when I moved to the UK I decided not to try to find the student groups from my home country, and mostly had English only friends and I got an local English accent super quickly. On the other side years later when my GF and me moved back to Norway for a few years she struggled to get non-international friends and didn't loose the accent.

[teiferer]

A native-language workplace helps too, but that's step 2. Step 1 is getting to a level that allows you to switch from english to local language at the workplace.