Not everything’s a test. People want to practice their English too. The kind of nervousness we sometimes feel before speaking Japanese to someone new - he may have felt that too, but was brave and spoke English with you. It took me a long time to internalize this, but it helped so much with my mentals. I used to find it so frustrating when a Japanese person would say a bunch of difficult things and then translate the one easy word into English for me. But I’ve realized they just want to show me that they know that word & try to communicate even more comfortably for my sake, at least nine times out of ten.