The brain is incredibly plastic. Chinese is spoken by 1.7B people and ostensibly most of them can read Chinese. If you listened to accounts of Western learner

The brain is incredibly plastic. Chinese is spoken by 1.7B people and ostensibly most of them can read Chinese. If you listened to accounts of Western learners' experiences learning to read and write Chinese, you'd probably believe it's some insurmountable and elitist language. They don't use an alphabet, how cruel and complex for newcomers. Immersion and necessity enable us all to accomplish really astounding things. When I consider my own personal journey - I learned how to code after a career switch, and if I were to enumerate all the things I have since internalised with respect to programming and software engineering, it would have seemed absolutely impossible looking at it from day one. From an education perspective, I wonder whether we lack the mechanisms to and culture to develop the tenacity to get over the initial learning barriers of difficult stuff. I love how YouTube is now finding more creative ways to show how music theory is relevant. Eg how contrapuntal music theory was critical to making music for Pokémon on the GB due to the very limited sound making capabilities.