command line vs gui 7004

The ordinary people don't speak any english. Many don't speak anything intelligible to most people as far as I can tell. Yes, my colleagues spoke english, which meant I didn't have to learn any spanish for a lng time. I finally learned it by getting into situations where I had to speak it, when I found that the pbuttive listening had resulted in my building up enough inner knowledge, unbeknownst to me, that I was fairly comfortable.

About the same happened to me in french, which I "learned" at school and at home from the age of seven, but never spoke or was able to speak in any sense other than doing the exercises - but at about age fourteen I got tired of not speaking and being considered dumb in clbutt, so I put my hand up and managed to make sentences with great difficulty, using the pbuttive data absorbed by my brain, and then improved rapidly (many years later the french civil service qualified me to bid for professorships in the french university system, and I went for some of them giving the trial lectures and so on, but I had stopped studying french in the school sense at age sixteen - I daresay you could do the same in english).

Oh, I'm pretty bad - because I'm largely uninterested in the language. But I do have at least one english colleague who is pretty close to perfect. I'm handicapped by not being able to do spanish "r"s - nor do I want to, since they sound horrible.

There are a whole load of russian sounds I can't even hear the difference between, let alone speak (that "shsh", "shch", "chch" set of consonants).

Peter