lies that limit language learning

Alliteration is so fun. Alternative title: my pet peeves For 10 years now, I've cycled through phases of learning Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Amazingly, 2026 marks a decade of consuming Chinese culture. I’m so used to seeing Chinese characters and I know pinyin perfectly, but I’m still not fluent in the language. :( My main language of study in college was Japanese. I took it for three and a half years and even took a Japanese linguistics class. TAUGHT FULLY IN JAPANESE. By all accounts, I should know both Japanese and Chinese near fluency at this point. I can tell you everything about the sociolinguistics of Japanese dialects, but I’d have to explain it to you in English. But that is exactly what a linguist is: we can describe the concept of language, but more often than not, we can't speak a ton of them fluently. That is a polyglot. Sometimes they're referred to as multilinguals. In some parts of the world, speaking multiple languages is normal and expected, often due to…