Which do you think would be more important when going to a new place: being able to understand and speak the language like a native, knowing the customs and practices of the place, or understanding the streets like somebody who has lived there for decades?
edit: as somebody described it, it’s language vs customs vs lay of the land
You can navigate anywhere: Time and space operate by the same rules pretty consistently, and even when you can’t do orienteering, there’s always map and compass or GPS.
Customs are easy enough to look up and in many places, they’re not even that important to know: You can probably get by without knowing all the customs and if any are really important, it’ll probably apparent.
Languages are different all over the place and much harder to pick up: I am only really fluent in 1 language, can sort of understand a couple others, know tiny bits of others, but most of them I do not understand and there are hundreds of them all over the planet. On top of that, knowing the language would also help you ask for directions, find out about local customs, etc.
Language for sure!
Plus, people will generally cut foreigners some slack for not knowing local customs. Hell, some black men used this fact to escape some of the effects of segregation in the Jim Crow era. A black American traveling through the South would be expected to accept discriminatory treatment. But foreigners were seen as exempt from these rules. Some black men would wear turbans while traveling through the South, pretending to be Indian and thus outside of the South’s racial caste system.