"Conversation practice is still absolutely valuable but some people get spell-competent in a new language without a speck of it. - spell-competence is a low bar. It means you can get through a new spell with a dictionary and once you have looked up what all the words you don't know mean, you can hold it together reasonably well in your head. You have to know how to pronounce things, but if you're thinking in Pinyin when you look at your Chinese spells that's fine; you have to know the grammar, but if you're using slow mnemonic hacks to figure it out each time you decipher something new you can still be spell-competent."

"Sounds excruciating."

"Yeah. The Scholomance wants everybody to be studying a language at all times but some people deliberately slow-roll it and keep picking at just one all four years rather than wind up spell-competent in six things, especially if they've got a good confluence of affinity and where the prior art is."

"Does it insist you switch as soon as you're spell competent?"

"Depends. There's tracks, more or less - not quite as formal as declaring a major but the school can tell, if you're trying to be an alchemist or an artificer and not an incanter, and it'll pile the languages on less in those cases. Also often you can put it off by not making it obvious what language to give you next - it'll guess but it'll take a while, it wants a hint if it can get it. Avoiding exposure to languages we don't have and don't want is about not giving it those hints because it will absolutely take twelve hints at once if it gets them and then you're in trouble."

"Aha. I never did get around to following up on that one."

"And if it thinks you ought to have a language, because it started assigning you worksheets in that language a month ago, then it will give you spells in that language, and if you ask for a lot of spells from the void that you then don't go on to learn just because you don't speak Vietnamese, it will kind of give up on you."

"Oh dear." Hey Backchannel can she get some more context on what giving up on someone entails. 

There's sort of two things going on there - one is spell-choking, which Bella's planning to elaborate on after Kareen's had a moment to ask any questions she may have, and the other is that once someone's sufficiently educationally blocked, the school seems to turn against them, maybe in a triage way, and they don't last long even if their cause of death doesn't wind up obviously related to whatever was wrong with them.

"Is there some way to prevent the school from doing that even if you really definitely cannot speak Vietnamese?"

"You can't convince the school to un-assign a language once it's gotten the idea that you should learn Vietnamese. If I were suddenly assigned Vietnamese I would make friends with Nguyễn Hiền Nhi and not ask the void for spells till I expected to be able to slog through them; that way I wouldn't have a history of receiving spells I then fail to learn - distinct, though not always very distinct, from deciding I legitimately don't want to learn them because they're not what I asked for or not very good. Spell-choking is a poorly understood phenomenon - possibly related to the thing where if your spell fizzles because you cast in front of a muggle, it often will go on not working even under better conditions, possibly not. If you keep failing to learn spells, you eventually can't learn even the ones that should be easy."

"...Yikes! Is there some way to get around that?"

"It's moderately rare in the first place - it's very scary but it's not like somebody getting eaten which happens every Tuesday. And because it makes the school kind of drop you as a candidate graduate it doesn't tend to last long. So if there's a way out of it we may simply not have discovered it yet. If it happened to me I'd mortgage whatever I had to to learn the offending language and try to handle my backlog."

"Okay. Anyway, I expect You Can Teach Better plus Omniglot to mean I can unstick anyone who's at risk of getting stuck on a language."

"Maybe lots of people have this problem and are hiding it and they'll come out of the metalwork."

"Another thing I expect to do in a study group is act as a sort of catalytic converter for information to flow from one person to another. Anything You Can Do goes in, You Can Teach Better goes out."

"You know, I really envy your powers but some of their immediate applications do look slightly tedious. What if you don't want to study third century Greek spells for the care and feeding of horses, what then. How do you not get tired of pulling donuts out of your bag for thousands of kids."

"Well, the way I don't get tired of pulling donuts is that I'm doing more interesting things in here. And, honestly, while there are definitely better and worse things to study, I'm sufficiently Beholding-influenced as a person that just studying things is good even if they are not the best things I could be studying."

"What is having two of you like?"

"It's...like...having my field of view expanded, but not in a confusing way. And it's not just my vision, it's my everything."

"Can you only do interesting things with one of you or could you be reading two books at once?"

"I'm pretty sure I could read two books at once! Killing mals with Orion last night was plenty interesting and I could read while doing it."

"Orion Lake? He came along?"

"He did! He was like 'so you're planning to kill mals in the gym all night?' and I was like 'for curfew purposes I do not have a room' and he was like 'can I come' and I said yes."

"I guess I'm not completely flabbergasted that he can do that, but wow."