The whole "once I land in a foreign country I'm going to stop speaking my native language" advice is only applicable to people with very specific personality ty

The whole "once I land in a foreign country I'm going to stop speaking my native language" advice is only applicable to people with very specific personality types and life situations. To the rest of us, it's not inspirational, it's demoralising to the extent that many people living abroad simply never acquire any good command of their host society's language. You can easily find American bankers in Shanghai who speak poor Chinese, or Korean shopowners in Sydney who speak poor English, or whatever. And you can deride them as lazy immigrants who refuse to assimilate, or arrogant expats who are only there because they failed in New York, or whatever. Or you can try to help them. The best advice I ever heard for learning foreign languages is: treat your brain the way it likes to be treated. This doesn't mean being lazy, but it does mean not putting yourself in situations that go against your personality type. And it means using learning methods that don't continually expose you to a sense of failure you hate feeling. Because otherwise your brain will just hate you later for putting it under stress, and take revenge by shutting down. That means you give yourself the kind of intellectual, social, or physical stimulation that you need to feel happy during the time that you do devote to your target language, and ignore the people who think you are "stupid" for doing this. Read a book in your native language, talk with people in your mother tongue, eat food from your homeland every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This is doubly important if you are learning your target language not because you LOVE LANGUAGES (like 100% of people who write language learning blogs) but because you need it for specific purposes. And finally, if you are the kind of person who is very sensitive to embarassment, then you do not have an "inhibition" to be "overcome", you have an extremely good system for detecting when you are violating social norms --- and knowing social norms is just as important as conjugations & vocabulary. No one wants to communicate with a guy who is fluent in their language but rude and uncouth by their cultural standards. Don't deliberately try to suppress your embarassment just so you can get 10 minutes of horrid conversation practise with the impatient cashier at your local supermarket while the line builds up behind you.