I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who watched my spouse struggle with it for over a decade while copping a completely unacceptable amount of flak fro

I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who watched my spouse struggle with it for over a decade while copping a completely unacceptable amount of flak from both native speakers and other ESL speakers of other primary languages who want to show them up for what is, to me, a very impressive amount of effort. A common topic of conversation between them and their friends is how soul-draining it is to keep up in English, and most of them are PhDs or high-middle management levels, they're not 18 year olds straight out of highschool English. I'm not just projecting my own struggles with learning Chinese.