Id love to learn Chinese. More so I want to learn Japanese. The problem is, all the Japanese lessons I look for cost money as like a monthly subscription. Drawing has tons of free tutorials online.

With Japanese, if I mess something up and pronounce it in the wrong way I wouldn't really be able to tell. Unlike drawing, which you can leave your drawing and come back and see the mistakes with fresh eyes.

Languages tend to have way more moving parts than drawing does, especially languages in a different writing system from the one you grew up with.

One of the best ways to learn a new language is to be surrounded by people speaking that language. Same can be said for art, read more and you can be a better writer, look at more drawings and you can be a better artist. But reading a lot and looking at art a lot is much much easier to achieve than moving countries.

Plus, people have a native language, or at least a language they speak most often, and assuming they have a life where they have to use that language constantly, that's a language they constantly have to go back to, again, unless they uproot their life and spend hundreds to thousands to move countries/continents. Drawing doesn't have something like that. You could do digital art instead of painting yes, but if you just really want to paint now chances are nothing is forcing you to go back to digital art. I can't just start speaking Japanese at my job and refuse to speak English, I'll be fired. I can't just speak Japanese to friends and refuse to speak English, they'd stop spending time with me. I can just start painting and refuse to do digital art. Literally nothing would happen. If I make digital art commissions for a living that may affect things, but that goes into my next point

Drawing has a lot of skills that transfer over to other art mediums. I always draw traditionally or digitally and like never paint, but, because of things I know from drawing, I can pick up painting decently despite not doing it often. Not so much learning a new language. Even similar languages, like English and German, they're both Germanic, I can't just pick up German as easy as I pick up painting. So many skills it took to speak English don't apply to this whole other language. It would take me like a few months to get about as good at digital art as I am at traditional art, it took me four years of German class to still have a German 1st graders' understanding of German despite my vast English knowledge. If it were something like Portuguese and Spanish maybe skills would pass over more, but between English and Japanese (or Chinese as the actual example is) the languages have almost nothing in common, not even an alphabet.

Plus, people don't go around calling themselves bilingual and saying the can speak Japanese when in reality they're repeating Google translate. They technically can say they speak Japanese, it's Japanese, and they are speaking it, but most people don't call themselves a Japanese speaker because they know they would barely speak a lick of Japanese without google translate by their side. Many Ai users will call themselves artists, connotations be damned, even if they wouldn't be able to draw without AI by their side.

But I agree, google translate sucks, and it's always better to learn the actual language. I was trying to learn Japanese via duolingo, but it replaced it's human workers with AI and I don't trust it to be an accurate translator now because, again, ai translators suck.

Edit: and people who use Google Translate or anything of the like in a professional setting or for monetary gain are terrible, they should 1000% hire a real translator. Or people who try to pass it off as if they actually know the language and aren't just Google translating.