In terms of going from an English to French, reading might come pretty easily — especially since there are already so many French loan words in English. But imagine you are a Hindi speaker trying to learn Mandarin, there’s not as much commonality and you can’t really jump into reading without a lot of prep work.

But your experience on the farm is essentially the lesson! You have to put yourself in a position where you have to learn or you’re stuck. Growth past that point isn’t easy, but it’s steady. We should be aiming for improvement not fluency, and fluency will come with the improvement.