Agreed here as well - the language system in 4e seems to have been pretty intentionally left simplified, and the version suffers for it.
I've had my crew be able to speak a smattering of Polish simply from osmosis in the default setting (by Ref fiat), and then linguist allows for additional languages as written. It's not great a great system though, especially when no one happened to get the linguist specialty on character creation. As a result, there are a fair number of Poles that speak English. :|
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