When leaving a group of people there are many ways to exit in terms of the verbiage you use to say goodbye. To a new foreigner, most likely the first term they learn is “bye” or “goodbye.” As they progress in their learning of the language, perhaps they starting adding in a “see you later,” or a “have a good night.”
However, there some parts of language and communication that take even years to understand. In the American culture, what I have realized is that there are many terms or sayings we use that don’t at all mean what they seem to say.
If a new foreigner heard you say, “good to see you, let’s hang out!” They might stop for a moment and ask for more detail on when this next time for hanging out is. You said let’s hang out. Does that not mean you want to plan a time to hang out?
But “let’s hang out” doesn’t mean, “let’s plan a time to get together right now.” It’s more of a polite way of saying goodbye to someone that you are potentially interested in investing more time in.
You can absolutely turn this into a different meaning for yourself. Maybe you want to be completely intentional about what you say. If you say “let’s hang out” you want to actually hang out, that’s fine, but you then have to be intentional about setting up times with people to actually make it happen.
We all live busy lives and can’t physically be everywhere at once, we can’t hang out with everyone we ever meet all the time. The “let’s hang out” expression has been abused so much by those who don’t mean it that it has in many ways changed its meaning from one of genuine interest to one of contemplative cowardness.
So, to anyone reading this, let’s hang out sometime.