Inner Joins instead of Select SQL

I am learning how you can use an inner join statement instead of a select statement to achieve the same result. For example, if you want to retrieve distinct languages spoken in Asia from a table of languages and a countries table, you can write something like:

SELECT code

FROM languages l

INNER JOIN countries c

WHERE continent = ‘Asia’

Or you can use two select statements:

SELECT l.code

FROM languages l

WHERE l.code IN

(SELECT c.code

FROM countries c

WHERE continent = ‘Asia’)

Clearly using an inner join rather than two select statements is more efficient. I believe in the first statement you do not need to specify the table since you are inner joining the tables on code. Would love to hear others thoughts on this. I am a newbie, so please forgive me if there is an error!