Well they haven't thrown him in a stew pot so I guess that's good. Language is always a fickle thing, the fact we managed to come up with it to begin with instead of grunts, clicking sounds, and points says something. No idea if that something is good or not but here we are.
The problem I always had with languages is context, so easy to understand in english so hard to convey when you didn't know how exactly, but Malik seems to be figuring it out. Still to be totally cut off from everything he knew, I bet he's wishing he had that Big Mac and fries back in chapter 1 lol.