It seems obvious that a huge (and hard to solve) reason for this is simply language! There are many levels of language proficiency:
Level 1: Can read and write it at your own pace
Level 2: Can comfortably converse in a professional setting (little slang or cultural knowledge needed)
Level 3: Can comfortably converse in a social setting (slang, faster speech, less clarification)
Level 4: Can do all of the above passively, being able to pick up valuable information just by overhearing conversation without focused metal effort
Level 5: Ability to do all of the above in a noisy and hectic situation (like a party, sporting event, etc)
It's really, really hard to make good friends without getting to Level 4 or 5. I work with many people for whom English is a second language. At work they don't miss a beat and are great teammates. But it can fall apart in a social setting. Once there are 5 overlapping streams of conversation stuffed full of cultural references these coworkers of mine very frequently lose track of the conversation and become quieter and quieter over time.
I bet you'd find that this 40% number is much different for students studying abroad in a country where their native language is common. My US friends who moved to the UK or Australia had no problem making friends.
I'm not convinced that language is actually such an essential aspect. Cultural similarity seems like a much bigger one.
For example, I've seen Indians with great English struggle a lot more to fit in and acclimate than French students with poor English but more shared cultural touchstones. As an American, I've found it to be much easier to make friends with Europeans than with students from non-Western cultures—even after controlling for English levels.
I agree to this. As a Non western student I never had any American friends in Collage. After more than a decade living in the US I still don't have any. Primarily because I am introverted but culturally I care less about American sports and music (two big cultural domains).
Edit: Another important factor (at least during collage) is the financial one. As a student from a poor country I had far less financial resources to afford a life style that American students enjoy. For example, I couldn't afford to go out or have a Car.
> but culturally I care less about American sports and music
Culturally I do not even understand this fascination with sports; we watch football (soccer) when there is some worldcup on and our country is playing but besides that the whole highschool quarterback and rooting for your teams all seems like wasted time to me. That might be cultural.
But I always turned that into a strength when making friends. If most people do something like watch sports or listen to music I do not like, I find the people that do not; those will be a niche. But I do not seek them out in obvious places with all likeminded people; when I go to AUS or US (and certainly when I was younger and looking for (girl)friends more) I go to sports bars and or clubs (where they will play music I do not like); in those places there will be 1-2 people like me that were dragged along or went along with their friends and who will be bored. Those end up talking with me and sometimes become good friends (two American ex girlfriends and many good friends, some I still do business with like that).
I am American and could care less about football, it does limit a lot of guy relationships if you don't care about watching sports. Playing sports is so much fun though, and a way better way to meet people.
Yes, it is all taste etc; I like doing sports (I don't like ball sports, but that's just taste); weights/martial arts etc and I still make friends that way. But watching... I just don't understand it, but I won't argue it either; it's just not my taste. It does prevent a lot of interaction though as so many Americans & Australians are fanatical about supporting / watching and I just do not get it at all. I go to my own bar when the EK/WK (europe cup/world cup) are on but I just pass out in boredom after 10 minutes. It's just a matter of taste; I end up outside talking with spouses that came with others who cannot watch either. It's fine. It's opportunity; got permanent clients for my business like that more than once like that.
I'm a non-American native English speaker and "I could care less.." confused me until I had it explicitly explained to me. I took it as some kind of inversion of "I couldn't care less" which I had heard plenty. It still doesn't make any sense (if you could care less, it's implicit that you care to some degree, right..?) but at least I get it now.
That's true. I couldn't care less about televised sports and professional athletes. Watching a game on T.V. feels like watching someone else's vacation videos. I'd rather get outside and do both activities myself.
That being the case, guy conversations that start out, "Hey, did you see the game last night?" typically end in awkward silence when I say, "No."
you do know that many Americans don't focus heavily on American sports and music? As someone who was born in the USA and raised, I have zero interest in sports. Music, I have a fleeting interest due to it's global acceptance.
Financially, not all Americans are rich or come from 2 income households. Alot of 18yr olds+ celebrate independence by moving out, taking a crappy local job at a fast food or retail and still, make American friends.
Introvertness isn't an issue, did you actually try? There are so many clubs that allow anyone to join and be friends. From meetup.com to local bookclubs.
But, we're also forgetting the big issue. Being American isn't like most countries in the world where you're born into a homogenous society. If you've lived more than a decade in the USA, and are a citizen, congratulations! You're a citizen, if any of your friends who aren't native born but also become naturalized, congratulations they're Americans!
Of course, I, know nothing of your background, so the above is all assumptions.
But, I felt like having to write this, as I wrap up spending 6 months in Japan.
>After more than a decade living in the US I still don't have any. Primarily because I am introverted but culturally I care less about American sports and music (two big cultural domains).
I'm a white American guy. I don't give two shits about American sports (or any other sports for that matter). The very best you can do is talk me into watching hockey, maybe, but I haven't done that in years (and that's more of a Canadian sport anyway).
As for music, what kind? There is no "American music". People who like rap probably don't like country, and vice-versa, for example. Lots of Americans have zero interest in pop. When I was in college, I didn't like any of those three, only rock and metal. It did affect which friends I had at the time though. But rock and metal in particular aren't American, they're Western, as a lot of it comes from Europe and UK.
But yeah, it's kinda hard to keep a friend if you have nothing in common with them. And this doesn't just apply to relationships between people from different countries; even within the same country it makes it hard to find friends. Notice how divided rural and urban Americans are now, or how big the racial divide is between white and black people. And that's people who all grew up in America, speak the same language, etc. The cultural values are so different that they don't form many strong friendships across these boundaries.
Indeed. My experience as an Indian grad student in Seattle was a miserable one to say the least; now I think of Americans as pretentious jerks who spare no moment to talk about "diversity" & "equality" and all these things, when in reality they are biologically just as "racist" as the red-necks.
I realized after a while to understand that what people really meant (in practice) was only that they were against the public display of insult, that one ought to be treated with a modicum of politeness. After the pleasantries, most folk just ignored you as if you didn't exist (or would talk behind your back). Some folk stood out and were just outright obnoxious for no reason.
Oddly, I developed a dislike for meeting the same non-Indian people twice. Meh. I wasn't annoyed because of these differences - I do believe they're biological - but I wish the discourse was more rooted in reality, which would've led to me to make better choices. I may not like Trump supporters, but hey I think they're atleast being honest you know. I now think of liberals as being hypocrites who use words to break apart communities and atomize people (more true of India than the US - but that's another story).
This is not to say that Americans aren't decent people - that they are - but there is a lot of pretension in that society. India is by comparison more than tolerable on that metric (if you keep away from the Westernized lot).
About people being instantly friendly and then ignoring you later on, I've heard the exact same thing from french students in America. In France, people will generally be very polite upfront but not overly friendly. Friendship has to be build over time (nothing is valued more than decade-long friendships, it is the subject of many french movies). I think many other (western) European cultures are similar in that respect, so it might be an American thing (in the spirit "everything has to happen now or never").
Corporate America can be very friendly upfront and brutal to murderous once you're out of sight. It's not about race but position and how people decide to obtain and maintain it. In other situations they may not have spoken with you simply for lack of knowing what to talk about together. The first times a newcomer comes to any gathering they're usually quiet and less interacted with by the group. At least that's how I remember things going in school and gaming. Plus cities create their own brutishness over scarce resources.
I'd say that the cultural differences between Chinese and Japanese are easily as big as the cultural differences between Chinese and Americans or between Japanese and Americans. So, no they would not be hanging out between each other because of similarity of culture.
If it were the language barrier that was the issue then actually between Chinese and Japanese students while the spoken language is very different, they can sort of communicate between each other via writing.
It actually is but obviously varies from person to person and from one environment to other.
I am from Eastern Europe and did my degree in England. In the first year, I lived in university halls and out of 8 people in the flat (including me), 6 people were English. It was really really hard initially because I could understand only about half of what they were saying because of the accents, so it was hard to participate and much easier to just browse internet in my room.
However, I picked up the language really quickly since I was very often surrounded by native speakers so all was good at the end, just the initial couple of months were really tough.
By now I have probably spent 1000 hours learning (as part of a formal process), reading, listening, writing and speaking English. Probably a lot more, but let's go with that estimate. The actual language learning part was probably 20%, the rest was acquiring cultural references.
I'm trying to do the same for French, where I'm probably around level 2 or 3, and damn, I had forgotten how long it takes to "load the cart".
In my opinion, native speakers actually "become" "native" in a lesser degree because they were born to parents speaking that language and in a higher degree because they went through school in that language. All the basic lessons at school that everybody learns, all those initial social interactions, day in, day out, in the language they will use for the rest of the life.
It's a lot harder to squeeze those in later on, especially since the interlocutors become less and less accommodating.
I'm American, lived in Brazil for 8 years, became totally fluent in Portuguese, worked at a local company, etc.
After about 5 years, I realized that no matter how much vocabulary I learned, how perfect my grammar was, or how reduced my accent was -- I would never get the references to childhood cartoons, or any of another 1,000 things that came from growing up there. And it's actually crazy how much of casual conversation revolves around all these things.
And finally coming back to the States, it was all just so easy -- such a luxury to have a whole shared cultural history with people I'd hang out with, so many jokes to make, so much richness to the conversation. Social conversation felt "full" again.
That's what they never tell you when you learn a new language -- the language alone isn't enough.
Addition: the funny thing is, I have a lot of non-American friends who get all (or most) of the American cultural references, because so many of them revolve around TV/movies, and those are exported around the globe. So part of the American so-called "melting pot", I suspect, is helped by the worldwide ubiquity of our entertainment culture.
I can relate to what you're saying. I'm American, born to English-speaking parents. But my father worked for the US State Department, and I spent almost the entirety of my childhood overseas. We moved from country to country (mostly SE Asia), and each location had its own unique challenges and delights.
But. The most difficult move for me, by far, was the one that took us back home to the states. Suddenly, and for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people that all spoke a language I could understand. But I understood nothing of what they were saying! Every joke, every reference... I had no idea what anyone was talking about, and it was awful.
It took me many years to get to the point where I was able to at least recognise the references, even if I didn't experience the things referenced. I still feel like a foreigner most places I go.
I don't say this with any sadness or regret. I feel I gained more than I lost. I loved my childhood, and the lessons I learned. But some were more painful than others, and the lessons in the difference between linguistic and cultural fluency were some of the sharpest.
This is the reason I rent old videos of "Anpan man" (a Japanese cartoon for 2-4 year olds), etc. I learn karaoke from the 80's and 90's (and even enka!). But even still, after nearly a decade in Japan, most of my social connections are actually my wife's friends and family.
It is quite interesting, though. My biggest goal in learning Japanese was to make a friend who could not speak English. That's what led me down my path. I think without that focus, it would have been quite difficult. Also a bit strange that my first real Japanese friend was actually the person who became my wife. For the first 3 years, we spoke only Japanese, but now her English is so good that we hardly ever speak Japanese :-P
It is interesting that it is so much easier to make friends with someone where they is sexual interaction (not necessarily actual sex right now - can be the possibility of sex in the future). It's not something conscious but the attraction/chemistry seem to smooth over the cultural and language barriers.
Source: my own life and similar anecdotes to yours.
Yes. This one of many reasons doing extensive reading of easy texts, children's stories and then later consuming TV and radio is so important. So many learners tend to take the approach of making a giant deck of flash cards or using an app like Duolingo and never get that much authentic input.
Going to school is probably the surest way to ensure that you do get all of the above, though it's not the only way. In the future, VR will give learners the quantity of practice and input that the world just doesn't have the patience to.
Also, massive amounts of conversation with natives. It turns out that most people are more than happy to talk about their childhood reminiscences with a foreigner, or explain the complicated rivalries between their home town and the next town over.
Most people love talking about themselves; as a foreigner, you are in some ways uniquely equipped to be a good listener. Wherever you go in the world, you'll find lonely people who are glad of the company.
It's not just raw skill but fatigue from the mental exertion of using a foreign language all day. You take classes in a foreign language all day and it's very hard to spend the evening hours also exerting yourself linguistically. I can empathize with the desire to just take it easy using your native tongue after a long day of keeping up with academics in a non native language.
I think this is the case. When a relative of mine went to Germany as an exchange student she very much intended (as the program advises) to make a lot of non-English-speaking friends. But speaking German was effort for her in a way that speaking English isn't, and after awhile she naturally gravitated toward other English speakers when she was ready to relax.
'For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.' - H. L. Mencken
American society is massively socially segregated by race and class, more so than in many other countries. I can form friendships with people with zero language in common, but it took me several years in the US to build a community of American friends despite being a native English speaker and a highly literate one at that.
American society is as good as it gets when it comes to inclusion. No other country, except maybe for Canada, had to deal with multiculturalism as much.
Humans are complicated social creatures by nature. There will always be cliques, competitiveness, the us against them mentality, etc. It's who we are. It's what got us here.
> No other country, except maybe for Canada, had to deal with multiculturalism as much.
There is a Christian majority country in the world that also has a ~15% Muslim minority, and it's not even particularly geographically confined. It's not US or Canada.
Curiously, it's also not a particularly inclusive country. Which just goes to show that multiculturalism doesn't necessarily translate to inclusiveness - it can also encourage silos.
That's actually the point the previous poster is trying to make. It's easy to have an inclusive society when everyone in that society is the same, and it's difficult to have one when there is so much cultural variation within it. One of the things that can be said for the U.S. is that it is fairly inclusive considering how diverse it is.
That hasn't been true since 1917. There are plenty of citizens in Russia who hail from other religious or ethnic groups, and they aren't any worse for it in terms of political rights.
The difference is how it is handled. Russia is structured as a federal republic, in which some constituent entities are explicitly designated as national republics. Those have their own official state language (in addition to Russian on the federal level), their own regional constitutions and laws etc.
But it also means that for the titular ethnicity, when they're outside of such a regional republic, they can face an attitude of "we don't do these things here, and if you really want to, you can go back home and do them there". In other words, different cultures are siloed rather than amalgamated.
This is oversimplified, because there's still plenty of amalgamation in practice - it's inevitable when people live and work and intermarry. But it's definitely very distinct from e.g. Canadian multiculturalism.
Interesting but they seem to be treating all cultures the same rather than weighting the relative differences between cultures. Papua New Guinea may have a lot of cultures, but they are a lot more similar than Indian and French cultures for example.
My decade of living in London suggests otherwise, on both the notion of inclusion and the claim that no other country has dealt so much with multiculturalism, which just sounds uninformed to me.
I've been using HN daily for about 8 years. There are about 5 usernames I recognize because I'm wowed by their knowledgable responses. Then there are about 5 usernames I recognize because I go wow, that guy is always an argumentative abrasive jerk. Yours is one of the 5 in the second category. Your need to include the Mencken quote is a small example of what pushes you down into that category. Perhaps the reason you find it difficult to make friends in the real world isn't race, class, segregation, or language, but personality. People who lead with positivity, and the expectation that will be able to make friends probably do a lot better at it.
That may also be a result of how Erasmus programs are structured. At least here in Czech Republic, Erasmus students tend to take classes taught in English, not classes taken by local students, so they interact with many other exchange students but not with locals.
I would think it is even more extreme with Erasmus students.
My thoughts about this are:
Erasmus students stay for a very limited time- 1 or two semesters and leave then. Forming real friendships take longer.
I have only so much time to meet and catch up with friends. Taking away from that time to invest in short term relations is a problem.
Erasmus student have other priorities than "natives". First is partying, second is partying and maybe third is university. From my experience regular students do not have the time to go out partying that much resulting in different peer groups.
Although this could be a factor, I have to disagree on this. Before any foreign student is given admission to an American University you need to take TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). You need this to be a high score to get admitted and depending on the country, you need to show this score at the American Embassy to get a student Visa. Unless it is some exchange program ALL foreign university students can speak English on a conversational level.
I am from Nigeria, where English is the National language. I grew up visiting America as a child because my parents grew up there for some portion of their lives. So even with all my linguistic advantages I still bonded more with other International students faster and better than I did with Americans (regardless of race).
I would say the issue I found was cultural, basic things like sense of humor differs. What a Nigerian finds funny is not always the same thing an American would find funny and vice versa.If you cannot laugh together, you have a problem. Same with etiquette, some things a Nigerian may do might be seen as rude to an American but a sign of love in Nigeria. The second issue I found is that Americans don't have a lot of curiosity beyond their own culture. A lot of Americans have the idea America is the best country in the world, so what could they learn from anyone else when they push the world forward, so there is a lack of interest to understand others perspectives and there is a gap.
I personally worked hard to have American friends and I have life long ones today both white,black, latino and Asian American friends but this did not come easy. This took about 10 years of open-mindedness and extroversion that was not always reciprocated.
And the best way to learn, practice and improve for the last two levels is to get involved, which means the ones need more chances are more likely to be separated from the group and this is very discouraging. Instead, babies and toddlers generally get more patient guides. That's a more important reason for adult second language learners. The general solution I can think of is to have a private coach to help them learn with feedback and correction so that learners are more likely to catch the limited chances to begin to get involved with groups. High quality chat bot could be a more affordable option for most learners, if the bot is good enough, which I'm not familiar with.
It's a bit of a catch-22 because you need a high level of interaction with native speakers to be able to get to Level 4/5, but it's intimidating and difficult to do so.
Most of the international students I've interacted that pushed through this were really, really social to begin with.
I'm not a social person by nature, but when I decided I wanted to learn Spansh, I had to go out of my way to talk to Spanish with people I didn't know. It was scary, embarrassing, and at times depressing, but my desire to learn the language overcame my fear of social embarrassment. I'm now trying to do the same thing with Portuguese.
There are ways to force interaction, but if the student doesn't understand how to learn or doesn't have the desire, then they'll never be able to comfortably speak with people. They don't have to be really social (it certainly helps), they just have to want it enough.
This notion is simplistic and unsupported by the article. The article mentions nothing about language proficiency and plenty about cultural adjustment, specifically about how peers and teachers interact with one another. There is a lot more cultural overlap with UK and Australia.
Similarly, I made a good number of friends who were international students by playing intramural soccer. I suppose you could say soccer is a common language.
A few comments below disagree with you, but my experience is exactly as you described it, and I am a native English speaker in Norway, where everyone speaks English (although not nearly as well as the media or the locals wold have you think). When it comes to following along at a noisy social event or when there are many conversations happening simultaneously I fall somewhere between 3 and 4 on the list. Cultural references and expressions can easily boot me from a conversation as I lose the thread and have to start thinking about the conversation instead of partaking naturally. There is little in the way of real cultural differences between the UK and Scandinavia but enough to make a person feel like an outsider. This often leads to me abandoning social interactions.
And it's also the reason why throwing an immigrant in English classes won't actually assimilate them. You can't teach Levels 4 and 5 without driven students and a welcoming populace.
Learning English in school is not the same as absorbing the culture, language, and social conventions in the real-world.
I know many people that knew flawless conversational English before immigrating but they were utterly baffled by some cultural conventions and turns of phrase not covered in class.
I have spent years living abroad and am utterly unconvinced by this argument.
The people who are easiest to befriend are not those with the best language skills, they are those with the same cultural (or sometimes religious) values. At least that has been a very consistent, reliable way of modelling this phenomenon of human behaviour in my travels.
A very obvious example is that alcohol is a large part of Western, and now, some Eastern cultures; but people whose religion and culture strictly abhores it will have a harder time being happy among a group of Western friends.
Other values around sex and relationships are more subtle but of real importance.
Further, pushing the limits of what's PC to say, the fact is many cultures have a "we need to stick together," or "we stick together to preserve our culture" attitude that ends up also drawing boundaries around social circles based on race due to culture.
Very close relationships, such as romantic relationships, on the other hand quickly approach the point where language fluency becomes absolutely necessary. But friends to do activities with on the other hand--I love it when people are speaking other languages, have different reactions and place different significance on events. It adds spice to life and opens your eyes to see other ways of viewing things the same way you always had.
I have to disagree on: "A very obvious example is that alcohol is a large part of Western, and now, some Eastern cultures; but people whose religion and culture strictly abhores it will have a harder time being happy among a group of Western friends."
Alcohol was always big in Eastern cultures. It's just not dominated because it is always considered an old people thing, not what young people do.
>It's just not dominated because it is always considered an old people thing, not what young people do
Yes, well that's true, but now it's part of youth culture so I think we're actually in agreement on that. However, what I'm not sure about is South East Asia..? I believe in places such as the Phillipines, drinking culture was largely introduced by the West, but I'm not sure about that.
I think it really depends on what period of history you are talking about and also what you mean by "West". The Philippines is, of course, currently dominated by the Roman Catholic religion, but in pre-hispanic days there were local animist religions. I don't actually know that much about Philippine history, but every other culture in the area had a rich tradition of alcoholic drinks. These days there are a lot of countries where drinking is frowned upon, but these are mostly Islamic countries. Before the countries became Islamic, the indiginous cultures very certainly drank a lot.
Now the question is whether the idea that drinking alcohol is a bad idea is a Western idea or an Eastern idea really depends on where you think the middle east is. But the far east has historically been quite keen on drinking.
Even though Buddhism does not really look at drinking as a great thing, I can't think of any officially Buddhist country that banned drinking. Japan was Buddhist for hundreds of years and even banned eating meat (though I don't think it was widely observed). But drinking remained a big part of the culture.
So my impression is quite the opposite of yours. SE Asia has historically been quite fond of drinking alcohol, but has seen prohibition relatively recently. That prohibition has mostly come out of the middle eastern cultures moving east, rather than the other way around.
Cultural norms, customs, and the fact that on many campuses, there are quite a number of foreigners, making it more difficult for the social scene to absorb.
US/UK and Australia are all basically the 'same culture' as far as people outside the Anglosphere is concerned.
> US/UK and Australia are all basically the 'same culture'
While indeed similar, a story on that: a friend at a high-end consulting firm here in Australia told of a US colleague who was over for a 6-month secondment. At the end of the visit, he apparently said "I wish I had known at the start that the people making fun of me probably liked me, and the people being perfectly polite probably didn't..."
As an Australian living in the US it was probably odder: I'd make fun of people that I thought were friends... which probably drove them away; while I'd be polite to people I didn't like.
My spouse always said she had a problem that people thought she was being genuine when she was being sarcastic, and sarcastic when she was being genuine: she even got told off at work about it.
> At the end of the visit, he apparently said "I wish I had known at the start that the people making fun of me probably liked me, and the people being perfectly polite probably didn't..."
That's not really a cultural difference. It's just basic social skills in America too.
Excuse the language, but Australia (Aussie/Kiwi here!) is where you call you friends "cunts" and your enemies "mate". So I can understand someone's confusion!
>But it can fall apart in a social setting. Once there are 5 overlapping streams of conversation stuffed full of cultural references these coworkers of mine very frequently lose track of the conversation and become quieter and quieter over time.
Hmm, this sounds exactly like me. And I'm a white American guy (obviously, English is my first and pretty much only language, unless you count the German I learned in high school where I don't even meet your level 1).
I'd say I'm at your level 4 with English. When there's too many people talking, I'm unable to discriminate. It's not quite as bad as it sounds, if the relative volumes are different enough I can (so in a bar if someone is talking into my ear and the other conversations are in the background, I can make it out though I'll ask for a lot of repeats), but my big problem is in the workplace, where people for some reason insist on carrying out multiple loud conversations in the same room, right next to each other, and seem to have no concept (unlike the bar-goers) that it's really really hard to follow one conversation when the other one is right next to you at the same volume.
Yet another reason I totally regret going into engineering and software, and wish I had gone into something else where I'd get an office.
No amount of studying outside of the native environment will give you the skill level necessary to easily maintain social conversations once you're in it.
English is not my native language. However, I went to a school that had a specific emphasis on English: we had 5 hours of it per week in the first three grades, gradually ramping up to 6 in middle school and 7 in high school, and adding English literature on top of that. We wrote numerous essays, listened to recordings of native speakers, and spent a lot of time talking and listening to each other.
Then I went to study in a college in a country where English is a native language. I could read and write easily - better than natives in many cases, in fact (I'll never forget a rant that our elderly ethics teacher gave to me in private about how, based on the essays she was grading, only people with non-Anglo names could spell "its" vs "it's" right consistently). I could also speak fast while remaining perfectly understandable, and showing only a very subtle, hard-to-identify accent - that's where those hours of listening to tapes and talking with other students to polish pronunciation really paid off.
But for the life of me, I couldn't understand half of what people were saying. It was either too fast, or it was in an accent or dialect that was too unfamiliar to parse easily, or it was too casual (shortening or outright dropping many things that are always there in writing); and often, all of these at once. I had to ask people to slow down and repeat things - made all the more confusing because I spoke at a much faster pace (as I was taught to) than what I could follow.
It took about two months for everything to really click to the point where I could follow any conversation, and a lot longer than that before it stopped being a conscious mental effort.
There's only so much you can learn from books and TV shows. One might have Shakespeare's vocabulary and mastered the intricacies of grammar, but there's no substitute for prolonged interaction with native speakers in achieving (near-)native proficiency in a language. Studying abroad is one of, if not the easiest way to get there.
I've met several people who have moved here to New Zealand specifically to learn better English. It's immensely difficult to learn another language when you have nobody to talk to. Reading and writing proficiency are easy, but the spoken component is just so difficult.
that's pretty demeaning. there's certainly overlap, however that's mostly US TV and movies being exported, which also happens in other (non-English speaking) countries. but each has a distinctive culture, with different TV shows, music, artists, celebrities, politicians, words, lifestyles etc.
now, speaking english with ease does make it easier to pick up on the differences. but it still takes effort to engage with people. i've seen people from other countries integrate easily because they were either very socially aware or simply made the effort, regardless if they spoke the local language with ease. this happens in countries and with people that aren't the UK, US, or Australia or from there.
Calling the US, UK and Australia "identical cultures" is pretty bad, just because they all speak English? True, they share common history, but they also have so many other influences that they're quite different. E.g. Wales, a country in the UK, even has it's own language which is still taught in schools and used officially everywhere.
I bet you'd find that this 40% number is much different for students studying abroad in a country where their native language is common. My US friends who moved to the UK or Australia had no problem making friends.