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日本語お上手ですね, and who gets told it
Ask long-term foreign residents of Japan what they are tired of hearing and this is the sentence. It is kindly meant, almost always, and it is also the most reliable signal available that you are being read as a visitor — because the giveaway is not the words but who receives them. Somebody three months in gets it as encouragement and is pleased. Somebody who has worked here for a decade in Japanese gets the same sentence and hears a boundary, because nobody says it to a colleague they think of as a colleague. The companion remarks make the pattern clearer: お箸使えるんですね, 日本に何年ですか asked immediately after you speak, and the surprise at your reading a newspaper. Note too that Japanese people who grew up abroad, and Japanese people who simply do not look the way the speaker expects, get told their Japanese is good as well — which shows the compliment is tracking appearance rather than fluency, and is worth knowing because it means the remark is not a judgment of your ability at all. The response is 謙遜 and the content is nil. What is worth watching for instead is the opposite signal: the day a colleague stops complimenting you and starts correcting you, teases you, or hands you something difficult without softening it first. 中村 has been doing all three since Alex arrived in Osaka. That is the thing to collect.