Yeah I always say that is a problem for future O'Brien to deal with.
Then when I arrive at a stardate in the future where I am obligated to fix the cascading failures that my procrastination has caused I curse past O'Brien for being such a lazy shit.
No one said he couldn't speak elvish. Just that it wasn't his mother tongue. That's what "...as a second language learner" means. That the person isn't a native speaker so they may sometimes be confused by phrases and think they are meant literally instead of as an idiom. Or they might confuse one meaning of a word for another. As someone who speaks another language, trust me when I say that it can be a constant problem.