That's really good advice, but I found it hard to put into practice because my German was so bad. And German isn't a language you can just hammer out a badly-formed sentence in; word position is less important than conjugation, so if you get the conjugation wrong it makes no sense at all to the listener. I did try this a few times, but everyone lost patience with the painful butchering of their language when they realised their English was a lot better than my German.

I would have moved city, but a: COVID b: my wife also had a job there c: I really loved Berlin and really enjoyed living there