A friend in China recently asked me how to improve her English. She’d struggled with it for years as a student, labeled herself “bad at languages,” and now wanted to try again for her career. But she couldn’t sustain her efforts. I asked how she’d been studying. She said she bought grammar books, pronunciation guides, vocabulary lists, and tried to memorize them. Why? “Because I need to start from the basics and learn systematically.” There it was. Even years after leaving school, she still…