I'll tell you what some of my great-grandparents did.
Two of my great-grandfathers came to NYC from Germany -- in different years and at different ages (15 and 20). First they found their way to the German-speaking part of NYC and found jobs and housing. I am not sure how much time passed or how they did it, but they learned English.
One of them married a young woman who had also been a German immigrant, but she was brought over by her parents as a young child and went to a Catholic school in NYC with her sisters. (I'm reasonably sure she learned English very quickly!) The young couple then moved to San Francisco, where he eventually owned his own barber shop, and the family (they had 5 children there) lived in the rooms above the shop. He applied for US citizenship soon after the move to SF, so his English must have been pretty good by then.
The other went from NYC to Pittsburgh for some reason and met and married a young woman who had immigrated with her parents from Ireland when she was about a year old. Needless to say, his English must have been good, and undoubtedly got better when he married an English speaker! They, too, moved to San Francisco and applied for US citizenship. All their children were born in SF and went to a Catholic school.
After finding housing and a job, learning English in the middle-to-late 1800s was the next most important thing to do, apparently. Marriage, moves, and having English-speaking children apparently caused them all to assimilate pretty fast!
How would immigrants learn to live in a nation with a culture different from their own?
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