It's super easy to learn how algorithms and what not work without knowing the syntax of a language. I can tell you how a binary search tree works, but I have no clue how to code it in Java because I've never used Java.
And similarly, i could read code in a language I dont know, understand what it does and how it works even if I don't know the syntax well enough to write it myself
Yeah, exactly. At least any fairly modern language. I don't think I could just pick up assembly and read it without the class I took. Heck, I don't think I could read it anymore now that it's been several years since that class.
I'm a full stack polyglot and tbh I couldn't program in some languages without reference docs / LLM even though I ship production code in those language all the time. Memorizing all of the function and method names and all of the syntax/design pattern stuff is pretty hard especially when it's not really needed in contemporary dev.