I’m pretty bad there too. I took 5 years of secondary school french, and I can generally sort of read it and make myself understood in Paris restaurants, for example, but understanding conversational speech is beyond me.
This again is one of those genetic talents I think. I have known people who seem to soak up languages quite effortlessly.
I will also say math. I can handle math on a level that I need it on an everyday level. Higher level math concepts are completely incomprehensible. I might be able to figure a way to plug numbers into formulas but I will never understand what those formulas really mean.
I once had an acquaintance who taught English in Japan. Most Japanese are very reticent about speaking English, even as their ability to read and write English gets better and better. He said he always thought it was because they get so little practice with native English speakers - both speaking and hearing it - they’re very uncomfortable even trying. So toward the end of the semester, he invites them over (or out) for drinks, purportedly to celebrate their impending graduation, but actually because he’s found that once they’re liquored up a bit, they lose their inhibitions, and pretty soon conversations that start the evening mostly in Japanese with a little English thrown in are nearly all in English. Some of the English was pretty bad, but the whole idea was to get them to use it, and it worked.
Your post reminds me of the time I was in Japan for a month. I had gotten into the habit of walking over to a takeout (mostly, they had a couple of sit down tables) sushi place and just pointing to the box I wanted. One time the clerk, a girl who looked to be about 16, started to talk to me in perfectly fluent, perfectly American accented English. I figured she had to have spent a fair amount of time in the US. But no, she had never been outside of Japan. She had watched a fair amount of American TV. Still her degree of fluency was absolutely amazing. Some people got the talent to learn languages and some don’t. I don’t. Just like some people have the talent to learn mathematics without effort and some don’t.
I took German for five years in middle and high school. The only thing I remember is “Ich trinke gern Limonade” — “I like to drink lemonade.” Fifty years later, and nope, still no chance to casually drop that in conversation. Life’s a lemon! 
As I mentioned upthread, I have a Spanish degree. I seem to have a strong ability to pick up written language and grammar. I can look at a completely foreign language and start to work out its structure. I blew through an intensive semester of college German this way (just for the hell of it.)
But my aural comprehension is not the best. Words blur together. And it’s hard for me to speak off the cuff. My teachers in college thought I was going to fail the oral part of the proficiency exam, but I surprised us both. I guess when the pressure is on, I do okay. I will note this exam had a 40% failure rate - and if you used a single English word it was an automatic fail.
About the only thing I have retained from German is pronunciation, and for that I just mean pronouncing anglicized German words. Volkswagen I can’t help but say “Folksvaggen." So basically useless.
I have a bad memory. Every time I see a movie it’s like the first time. I recently saw A Beautiful Mind for the second time and my memory is so bad that I completely forgot the major twist of the film. I was surprised all over again. Sigh.
I have a terrible sense of direction. My wife, who has an excellent sense of direction has to navigate. I sing ok but get bad stage fright. Not very handy with household repairs either.
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I took German for two years in high school and I can’t remember anything at all.
I lived in Taiwan for 10 years and never got very far
However, for some reason, Japanese clicked with me and I’m “business fluent”.
I am really bad at telling jokes….the sort that is already scripted. I think it is a combination of forgetting the punch line, or delivering it wrong.
However, I am known for my funny quips and puns and amusing stories. That is a weird combination.
I’m bad at a lot of things already mentioned: social skills, including remembering names and faces. Organisation and being on time. Ball sports, and anything requiring hand-eye coordination - I’m even terrible at computer games, which is especially annoying because it reduces my enjoyment of playing. But the one that looms largest here is writing. I’m probably above average on a population scale, but I have a lot of ideas and I struggle to express them clearly. Other people make it look so easy, but I write and rewrite and I’m still not happy - it’s so frustrating.
And similarly with fiction: I have ideas that I think would make a good story, but when I try to write them down, they never come out right. It’s a shame, because I love reading, but can’t contribute anything myself.
Oh, that’s what writing is, forever failing to translate the best of your imagination to words. It’s incredibly frustrating for all writers. Though I actually think you express yourself pretty well here.
I know you’ve said you struggle socially. I know you don’t always have the most agreeable opinions about things here and don’t always feel like you fit in. I just wanted you to know that I like you. I don’t have to agree with you about everything to like you. For what it’s worth.
Haven’t read the thread, but for me it’s music. I’m tone deaf. My four-year old grandson asked me not to sing. When my daughter took Suzuki violin the pre-K kids got asked to identify notes. The could. I couldn’t.
I had a harmonica once. All notes near each other sounded the same.
I’m better at sports than music, and that’s saying a lot considering how bad I am at sports.
Years of practice have made me better at message board posting. When I started, I couldn’t bear to read my own posts back because it made me cringe so hard. But I was tired of writing and rewriting replies in my head, and wanted to get them out. And it worked: when I had posted something, I was finally able to stop thinking about it.
I hoped the skills would be transferable to writing fiction, but alas. My mind still freezes up when faced with an empty page.
The other issue is lack of feedback. If you’re writing essays at university to be graded, presumably they’ll tell you if your structure is bad, explanations unclear, or you’ve screwed up the punctuation, and how you can improve it. You don’t get that in the wild, just people snarking if you misspell a word.
Thank you. Posting here I often feel like I’m constantly putting my foot in it saying things I didn’t mean, on top of being the unwelcome person bringing up awkward points that no one wants to hear. It’s good to know not everyone hates me.
Ditto – especially sports that involve a ball. In my case it’s because I’ve never been interested enough to develop any skill.
Music – instrumental or vocal. My sister-in-law asked one day if I could hear myself singing. Tes, sometimes my singing is bad enough that I notice it, but of course by the time I hear it, it’s too late to do anything about it.
AT 72 years old, I am still terribly bad at Math. I had a very hard time with it as a child and the teacher I had from 2nd grade to 5th grade was, in retrospect, not really all that good at it either. Also, my grade school years were during the New Math Experiment I was having a real hard time with straight arithmetic and the advanced concepts being taught, by a teacher who didn’t understand it either, soon left me way behind. I took Algebra 1 three times before I got a pity pass.
I went into the Trades mainly because I knew that I would not be able to pass college level math. As an electrician, I studied the math needed really hard and relied on a calculator. For some weird reason geometry made sense to me and bending conduit was a breeze.
Art. I was never interested in it an never made any effort to try anything artistic such as painting or sculpting. I was much more interested in math, science, space, etc.
For a second grader that was having trouble with basic arithmetic, the concepts being (poorly) taught were way over my head. Topics introduced in the New Math include set theory, modular arithmetic, algebraic inequalities, bases other than 10, matrices, symbolic logic, Boolean algebra, and abstract algebra.[2]
Mrs. Wagner was really unable to help me.
I have a niece who is like that. She had two problems: she never got most jokes, and she couldn’t tell one to save her life, which was actually amusing in itself. As she butchered the setup or the punchline, my brother and I would be howling.
So I always think piloting aircraft seems to be an intersection of the two things I am least good at: namely fine motor control and detail-oriented checklists.
I should never be allowed near any pilots seat 