Josh,
That would make perfect sense IF those two sentences were anywhere near one another or referenced in the same Character Step. However, they are not.
Step 5: Choose your hero's Home Nation and Region (Page 122) is the reference for Step 5. Page 122 is the table for nations and regions and it states:
Code:
Your hero’s homeland provides him with some rudimentary skills and determines if the character is automatically literate.
- Choose a Region and Nation from Table 2-6: Regional Skills.
- Choose 2 Skills from your home nation and add 1 Skill Rank to each.
- Also, choose 1 of the Native languages as appropriate.
The "Also," is in relation to what you get from your hero's homeland and has nothing to do with the Linguistics Skill.
The other reference to "one of which must be your national Language" is in the Linguistics Skill and the only table it refers to is the Language Table and not back to Table 2-6 or page 122. In addition to this being in a different section, one uses the term Native Language and one uses national language. Granted, they could be intended to be the same thing, but they are still chosen in different parts of character generation.
That is the reason I consider them two separate steps and not related. Overall, the sentence about Passive Logic is really in a bad place and could be missed by a lot of folks new to the system if they don't take Linguistics as a skill. By a 'strict' reading, one could argue you don't get your passive Logic in languages UNLESS you are also trained in Linguistics as it's all in the same paragraph and that sentence begins with "In addition,".
I'm certainly not claiming I am right, but considering there are no races that don't get their Native Language / national language, the entire 1 must be in your native tongue seems redundant and unnecessary. Being in a different area from Choose a Nation also lends to this. it really is an ambiguous area and would benefit from an official ruling on how those 3 sections interact.
John