Some of the obstacles of adult language learning and of adult implicit social rule learning are both similar and extrinsic. It seems to me that there’s a lot of cases where having an obvious ‘childhood’ or ‘foreigner’ role cues people to impart necessary information, but once you’re past that point, it’s both expected that you’ll already have it and broadly Not Done to give it to you anew—and I don’t just mean by explicit instruction, because other people will implicitly change their behavior around you in a way that ‘ruins’ the signal. Outside of very specific environments, finding a way to credibly signal “I want to integrate” at the correct visceral levels and get the other people to actively avoid papering over things in a way where a slip-up will permanently relegate you to the ‘weirdo’ role is rather hard, and if you don’t have enough initial sense then you won’t even know when it’s happened.
There are ways of mitigating all of this, but I guess what I’d say is that getting real practice in anything social where there’s this kind of status/integration involved tends to itself have strong status/integration social prerequisites—so it’s a very noncentral example of practice, enough to make “it takes practice” misleading when unqualified. This is as distinct both from a lot of more specific skills which still have a major social practice component (martial arts, ensemble music) and from skills where solitary practice gives you the bulk of the signal (mathematics, maybe running?).
Also, if the social skills you’re trying to learn involve something like class performance in a highly contested social class, people around you will have a more active incentive to make it more difficult. So it can also be adversarial practice…
Some of the obstacles of adult language learning and of adult implicit social rule learning are both similar and extrinsic. It seems to me that there’s a lot of cases where having an obvious ‘childhood’ or ‘foreigner’ role cues people to impart necessary information, but once you’re past that point, it’s both expected that you’ll already have it and broadly Not Done to give it to you anew—and I don’t just mean by explicit instruction, because other people will implicitly change their behavior around you in a way that ‘ruins’ the signal. Outside of very specific environments, finding a way to credibly signal “I want to integrate” at the correct visceral levels and get the other people to actively avoid papering over things in a way where a slip-up will permanently relegate you to the ‘weirdo’ role is rather hard, and if you don’t have enough initial sense then you won’t even know when it’s happened.
There are ways of mitigating all of this, but I guess what I’d say is that getting real practice in anything social where there’s this kind of status/integration involved tends to itself have strong status/integration social prerequisites—so it’s a very noncentral example of practice, enough to make “it takes practice” misleading when unqualified. This is as distinct both from a lot of more specific skills which still have a major social practice component (martial arts, ensemble music) and from skills where solitary practice gives you the bulk of the signal (mathematics, maybe running?).
Also, if the social skills you’re trying to learn involve something like class performance in a highly contested social class, people around you will have a more active incentive to make it more difficult. So it can also be adversarial practice…