I started learning Chinese seven years too late.

This is one of those admissions that's easier to write than to say out loud to a room full of people who did it right. I've lived in Taiwan for years, and somewhere in that stretch I fell into the most comfortable trap I've ever built for myself: not learning the language.

Read also: Western Food Became My Comfort Food in Taiwan

I didn't move here with a plan. I followed a Taiwanese partner back then, and got thrown into a new country the way you get thrown into cold water, all at once, no warm-up.

Every foreigner who's moved somewhere unfamiliar knows the specific awkwardness of that first year: not knowing how to order food, not understanding a bill, standing in a government office hoping someone's patience outlasts your confusion.

I skipped most of that. I always had someone next to me doing the talking. Ordering food, opening bank accounts, handling immigration paperwork, navigating whatever bureaucratic maze needed navigating that week.

It sounds like the dream version of moving abroad, and for a while it was.

Then it became normal. Not a kindness I was grateful for every day, just the natural order of things. That's the part that took me years to notice: convenience doesn't announce itself as a problem.It just quietly becomes the water you swim in.

Some of that time gets an honest excuse. COVID happened. My partner was diagnosed with throat cancer, and I stepped back from business to focus on her health, on hospitals, on the parts of life that make language class feel like a luxury you can't justify.

But even accounting for all of that, it isn't really an excuse for seven years of zero. That part is on me.com

The realization landed hard this year. I sat with the plain fact that I can't speak, read, or understand basically anything, and that if I keep living here like this, I'm screwed.

Quietly and structurally screwed, the way you are when you've built a life on a foundation someone else laid for you.

What sharpened it further was meeting a Canadian guy last year who's been married to a Taiwanese woman and living here for something like 23 years.

His Mandarin is zero. Not rusty, not basic. Absolute zero. And I recognized something in him I didn't want to recognize in myself: a point where you stop caring, where not knowing the language gets absorbed into your identity instead of pushing you to fix it.

English became my comfort language here, the same way it clearly became his. I'd meet genuinely warm Taiwanese people who'd ask me something in Chinese, I'd say I don't understand, and we'd both retreat to English, the middle ground.

After enough of those exchanges, a pattern sets in on both sides. They want to practice their English. I get to avoid the discomfort of practicing my Chinese. Nobody's at fault, which is exactly what makes it so easy to keep doing.

It doesn't stop at conversations either. I go to the same bars, the same restaurants, the same 7-Elevens and Family Marts often enough that the staff knows what I drink, what I eat, what I'm going to ask for before I ask for it.

Minimal language required, needs met anyway. It sounds like the dream again. Lately it feels closer to a nightmare, the kind where you realize the convenience was never free; it was just billed later.

So in 2025, seven years too late, I finally started learning. I'm barely past introducing myself. I still don't have the discipline to sit down and repeat, drill, and speak a little every single day, the unglamorous part nobody puts in the highlight reel.

If there's one thing I'd say to a foreigner just landing in Taiwan, comfort zones don't feel like traps while you're building them. They feel like relief.

Every year you postpone the language is a year that convenience compounds against you, quietly, without asking permission. Start earlier than you think you need to, even badly, even embarrassingly, because badly and early beats fluent and never.

Now that I've admitted this in public, I'm going to document the attempts here, the failed ones and the ones that stick.

Living as a foreigner in Taiwan has been good to me. But I still feel like one, fully, until I can speak the language of the place I've chosen to live in.