The hidden cost of working in a second language

Last week, I facilitated a four-hour workshop at a client offsite at the Hilton in Los Angeles, entirely in Japanese.

What's interesting is that neither English nor Japanese is my native language. I've spent most of my adult life working professionally in both, and I use them every day. Yet after four hours of teaching, facilitating discussions, and answering questions in Japanese, I was exhausted in a way that surprised me.

The workshop went well. The participants were engaged, the discussions were lively, and the objectives were met.

But on the flight back to San Francisco, I found myself reflecting on why it felt so much more draining than delivering the same workshop in English.

The answer, I think, is that fluency and effortlessness are not the same thing.

In English, much of the communication process has become automatic. In Japanese, even after decades of living and working in and with Japan, part of my brain is still actively managing nuance, phrasing, formality, and whether what I said landed exactly as intended.

The audience doesn't necessarily see that effort. They just see someone speaking Japanese.

It reminded me of conversations I've had with many Japanese expatriates working in the U.S. Their English may be excellent. They may be leading teams, managing customers, negotiating contracts, or presenting to senior executives. Yet many describe the same feeling: the constant mental effort of operating professionally in a language that isn't their own.

At the end of the day, it's not just about vocabulary. It's about the additional mental energy required to think, persuade, negotiate, build relationships, and make decisions in a different language and culture.

That's why I've come to believe that language training isn't really about language. It's about reducing cognitive load.

Whether we're helping Japanese professionals develop business English skills or helping local hires learn practical Japanese, the goal is the same: to free up mental energy so people can focus on solving problems, building relationships, and doing their best work.

After all, there's a big difference between being able to communicate in a language and communicating so naturally that you no longer have to think about it.

And sometimes the strongest people in the room are the ones doing two jobs at once: delivering the work while translating their thoughts into a language that isn't the one they first learned to dream in.

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