How confusing are other languages to the Xi'an? Do they understand other languages?
TL;DROther languages might be challenging for Xi'an phonologically, but their lifespans of hundreds of years let them spend decades learning, so they can become fluent in far more languages than humans.
That's a great question. I would say if you're talking about an everyday cook or an everyday truck driver on a Xi'an world who's essentially bilingual, meaning they only speak the proper Xi'an language and then they speak the service dialect, but they haven't had exposure to other alien cultures, there are a lot of things about their language and the way it works phonologically and other things that might make certain other languages challenging for them. But they have the ridiculous advantage over us humans that they live for hundreds of years. So we might give ourselves 18 months or two years or three years to learn a language. They can spend 30 years studying a language without kind of blinking an eye, if you know what I mean. So 30 years applied to learning some other alien language is not a big deal for them. So that means not only can they become extremely fluent in other languages, but they can learn many, many more languages than we can, because even if we're extremely linguistically talented, humans learn 10, 15, maybe 20 languages, but a Xi'an could easily learn 100 languages because they have so much more time to apply themselves to learning it.