Chinese. I've spent the past year doing an advanced language study at a leading university in Beijing. The experience was very motivating, but at times very humbling. The teachers there were fantastic tutors and great sticklers for detail.

The teachers stressed equally the importance of thoroughly mastering both the language and the cultural context. You can speak the language very well, but unless you become part of the "in-group" by amassing all those cultural symbols and idioms, you won't progress much beyond just being a foreigner speaking Chinese, and the things you'll be capable of expressing will sound very Western. One of my teachers remarked: not bad, you've got the fundamentals right — I'd say, five more years and you'll be really great! (That in the top-level class!) And that gap is there not just because of the immense headstart that every subject of their nine-year compulsory education system benefits from: scores of memorised poems, historical passages and excerpts from literature. You can also feel that gap present whenever you don't know how to call or use this vegetable, what the deal is with the tricolor glaze on historical artifacts, and which food traditionally goes well with alcohol.

I think that, as a Westerner, you can master English (for many definitions of "master") without becoming an expert on the U.K. or the U.S.. To master Chinese, I think that you can't help but become a sinologist. The cultures are too different to coast on a shared legacy. But it helped a lot to live a year there.

Anyway, one of the fathers of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun, once wrote an essay [1] in which he advocated for a relaxed, non-commital approach to reading books. If you see an interesting book on the table, open it and leaf through! If you have to put it down after a few pages, so what? Make it a habit to check out every book you encounter. Over time, bits and pieces that you glean from those scattered pages will build up into extensive knowledge in a wide range of subjects, and a sense for what the world is.

I've been doing this with quite a lot of writers recently, and that has been helping me cover a lot of ground. Right now, I'm currently reading a collection of essays by Wang Zengqi (1920–1997) titled "Life Is Very Fun" [2]. The writer was an optimistic soul, full of vitality, and in his essays he delighted in surveying the life of the average Chinese and their small daily pleasures, especially of the people in Beijing, where he moved fairly early in life, and of those in his hometown in Gaoyou. He's written a lot about plants, vegetables, food, and the seasons, all with great scrutiny and personal interest.

And so I'm pleased to say that, after reading a humble essay titled "Radish" and vigorously cross-checking videos in social media, I can now recognize white radish, small red radish, large red radish, green radish, purple radish, beautiful heart red radish, red-in-the-middle radish, and then some [3].

[1] https://www.marxists.org/chinese/reference-books/luxun/18/02... — I'm not sure if there's a translation around.

[2] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%94%9F%E6%B4%BB%EF%BC%8C%E6%...

[3] Loose translations of 白萝卜、小水/杨花萝卜、红皮萝卜、清萝卜、紫萝卜、心里美萝卜 and 穿心红萝卜.