I speak Korean. Not fluently, but enough. I can hold a meeting, order lunch, survive a 회식 without embarrassing myself. Drop me in a room with Korean coworkers and I'll be fine.
But writing at work is a completely different thing.
When you're speaking, you have backup. You can gesture, you can pause, people see your face and fill in the blanks. If something comes out weird, you just rephrase it and move on. Nobody's rereading your spoken words.
Writing doesn't give you any of that. A Slack message to your team lead. A Confluence page. A Kakao reply to a client. It just sits there, and it either sounds right or it doesn't.
Your Korean colleagues type out messages in seconds. I'm sitting there for five minutes on a two-line reply, reading it back three times, wondering if it sounds too stiff or too casual or just... off, in some way I can't quite put my finger on.
And honestly it's not even just Korean. Some days I need to write an English email to headquarters and I want it to sound sharp and professional, but my brain's been running in Korean all morning and now my English feels clunky too. Or I'm writing a Jira ticket and I just want to be clear, but I've been switching between two languages all day and by mid-afternoon I can barely compose a sentence in either one.
That's the thing nobody warns you about. It's not that you don't know the language. You do. It's that you can't keep up. Your coworkers aren't faster because they're smarter. They're faster because they're not translating in their head while they type.
If you've worked in a second language, you know this feeling. And you know it's not something more vocabulary is going to fix.