I think it's much tricker than you said. Those are just a variety of small details, and there are many more in the same general category. But that doesn't stop it from working. It's very noisy data whatever you do. The difficulty may approach that of learning English while you're there. That could take a decade, who knows. Children learn English faster than that, but we do lots of things to help them, but OTOH the alien is super smart and has computers to analyze patterns in the language.
(Of course if the alien does pick up English, these context problems become pretty small.)
I took the original question to be about the fact that what constitutes a good dance move is arbitrary. That's a fundamental problem. How do you figure out something that's just an arbitrary convention? Well, the solution is to look at the people who decide it.
How people react to stuff, like what they say, is not arbitrary. There's a method to it that you can figure out, unlike dancing which arguably doesn't have a method (I'm not taking sides on that, I just interpreted the problem to be to assume dancing hasn't got a logical method to it).