There is no shortage of advice for people planning to move to a new country. Sort out your visa early. Open a local bank account before you arrive if you can. Research the neighborhood before you sign a lease. Bring more money than you think you need. All of it is reasonable. Some of it is genuinely important. But if you ask people who have actually made the move — not the ones who lasted eighteen months before retreating home, but the ones who truly settled, built lives, and stopped feeling like permanent outsiders — most of them will tell you the same thing when pressed.
Learn the language. Learn it before you go, keep learning it after you arrive, and treat it as the single most important investment you can make in your new life. Nothing else comes close.
The Illusion of Getting By
The most common objection to this advice is that it is unnecessary. English is spoken everywhere, the argument goes. Tourism and expatriate infrastructure have made it perfectly possible to live in dozens of countries without speaking a word of the local language. And in a narrow, technical sense, this is true. You can survive in Tokyo, Lisbon, Berlin, or Mexico City with English alone. You can order food, navigate public transport, conduct basic transactions, and hold down a job in an international company.
But surviving is not the same as living, and getting by is not the same as belonging. The person who relies entirely on English in a non-English-speaking country is not really inhabiting that country so much as they are floating above it, moving through a thin international layer that sits on top of the actual place like a film. They interact with other expatriates, with tourist-facing businesses, with the fraction of the local population that speaks English well enough to engage with them. The vast majority of the society around them — its humor, its arguments, its gossip, its kindness, its texture — remains permanently out of reach.
This is not a theoretical loss. It is a daily, felt absence that accumulates over time into something that can genuinely corrode the experience of living abroad. Many people who move to a new country and never learn the language report a persistent sense of loneliness and disconnection that they struggle to explain. The language barrier is often the explanation they are missing.
What Language Actually Unlocks
When you speak the local language, even imperfectly, the nature of your relationship with your new home changes in ways that are difficult to fully anticipate until you experience them.
The most immediate change is practical. Bureaucracy, which is the unavoidable machinery of settling anywhere new, becomes navigable in an entirely different way. Dealing with a government office, a landlord, a utility company, a doctor, or a school in your own language rather than through a translator or a helpful intermediary gives you agency and dignity that you simply do not have otherwise. You can ask follow-up questions. You can push back. You can catch mistakes. You are a participant rather than a passenger in your own administrative life.
Beyond the practical, the social transformation is even more significant. Local people respond differently to someone making a genuine effort in their language, even when that effort is clumsy and error-prone. There is a warmth that opens up when someone hears their own language attempted by an outsider with sincerity, a willingness to engage and help and include that is rarely extended to those who do not try. Language is not merely a communication tool. It is a signal of respect and investment, and people read that signal clearly. The foreigner who speaks the language, however badly, is demonstrating that they have taken the country seriously enough to do the hard work of meeting it on its own terms. That is noticed, and it matters.
Deeper still, language carries the entire interior life of a culture in a way that no translation fully captures. Humor is perhaps the clearest example. Comedy is almost impossibly culture-specific, built on shared references, wordplay, timing, and a collective sense of what is absurd. The person who cannot access the language cannot access the humor, and a culture without its comedy is a pale, flattened version of itself. The same is true of casual conversation, of the particular way people talk to each other in markets and bars and on street corners, of the specific rhythms of argument and affection that vary so dramatically from one language to another. These are not decorative features of a place. They are the place. Without the language, you are always looking at it through glass.
The Fear That Holds People Back
Most people who move abroad without learning the language are not lazy. They are afraid. Language learning as an adult is a genuinely humbling experience, and humility of that particular kind — the kind that requires you to perform incompetence publicly, to mispronounce things, to use the wrong word, to be gently corrected by children — does not come easily to people who are otherwise competent and confident in their daily lives.
There is also the problem of time. People planning a move have an enormous amount to organise, and language study is easy to deprioritize because the consequences of not doing it are not immediately visible the way an unfiled visa application or an unbooked flight are. The cost of not learning the language only becomes apparent gradually, once you are already there, already settled, already embedded in a life that is functional but somehow not quite full.
The fear is understandable but it is worth examining honestly. You do not need to achieve fluency before you move. You do not need to sound like a local or understand every word of a fast-moving conversation. What you need is enough to begin — enough to attempt basic interactions, to show that you are trying, to give yourself the platform to keep learning once you are immersed. Even three to six months of consistent study before departure can transform the first year in a new country from an isolating ordeal into something approaching genuine adventure.
Immersion Does the Rest, But Only If You Let It
One of the genuine advantages of moving to a country rather than just visiting it is that the language surrounds you completely once you are there. This is an extraordinary resource if you are willing to use it. The problem is that modern life makes it very easy to avoid using it. Smartphones, streaming services, English-language social media, and tight-knit expatriate communities can effectively insulate you from the local language almost entirely if you allow them to.
The people who make the fastest and deepest progress after moving are the ones who treat immersion as an active practice rather than a passive backdrop. They watch local television even when they understand very little. They attempt conversations in the local language even when the easy route would be to switch to English. They make local friends rather than retreating entirely into expatriate circles. They sit with the discomfort of not understanding everything and trust that the understanding will come.
And it does come. That is the remarkable thing about being surrounded by a language. However difficult the progress feels in the early months, something eventually shifts, and the language that once sounded like impenetrable noise begins to resolve into meaning. That shift is one of the most profound experiences available to a person who moves abroad, and it only happens to those who have done the groundwork.
The Move You Actually Want to Make
If you are planning to move to another country, you are presumably doing so because you want to live there, not merely to occupy it. You want to understand the place, to be understood by it, to build something real rather than to exist in a comfortable but hermetically sealed bubble of familiarity.
The language is not an optional feature of that ambition. It is the foundation of it. Everything else you do to prepare — the research, the logistics, the financial planning — is important, but it is scaffolding around the central project. The central project is becoming someone who belongs in the place you have chosen, and that belonging is built word by word, conversation by conversation, in the language that the place calls its own.
Start before you feel ready. Stay with it after you arrive. The life waiting on the other side of that effort is worth every awkward moment it costs you to get there.