That’s a pretty good point… if I saw ‘three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard’ forget how to write ‘sneeze’, I would assume they were lunatics pretending, not that they genuinely forgot how to write the word.

Does that imply learning the advanced literary culture, that is usually associated with prestige academia, has a vastly higher threshold in Chinese than in English?

It’s pretty disturbing for language itself to be a potentially retarding force on learning.