That's good.

There's a movie about a guy who has to repeat a day over and over, and he's snowed into a small town and can't get out, and he has it much worse than me in all respects except that he doesn't have to witch-hunt, but he learns to play the piano and stuff, I expect to be looping for a long time even with your song helping and might as well pop out psychologically healthy and having picked up lots of facts and skills.

Yeah, definitely. 

I wonder if you'll ever get more desensitized to human movies.

Probably. Soldiers don't cry whenever they kill an orc.

Well, yes, but presumably they don't do it recreationally, there's 'can watch bad dramas on TV without making that wounded face' and 'would enjoy Groundhog Day'.

Some people probably enjoy killing orcs, at this point. But yeah, I don't know.

Well, there's parks and museums and stuff to occupy you if you don't get there.

Thanks.

You're welcome. - And books might not bother you as much as TV, they can skip some of the visual shorthand to convey stuff and the content wouldn't be as in your face, but that'll have to wait till you know more English and have learned to read it too.

Isn't learning to read pretty hard? I don't know many people who've done it.

Almost every human can read.

Huh. Okay.

People learn it when they're like five. It's probably a lot harder in a society where most people do it, though, no opportunity to practice? I can teach you to read in English if you want.

If everyone here can do it I probably should learn.

It'd make it easier to navigate without me, a lot of things are explained in written form.

All right.

Unfortunately, English has a really stupid writing system. It's not the worst there is, but it's pretty bad.

Bella pulls out a notebook and writes out the alphabet and explains upper and lower case letters.

There's kind of a lot of them. I think the Noldor only have twenty, and no cases, and a voiced and unvoiced consonant are the same letter flipped.

Yeah, the cases are kind of dumb. So are a couple of the letters. But this is what we've got. These ones are vowels - and sometimes this one is, but not always - and they can make a bunch of different sounds and you usually need context to narrow it down very far. The consonants are more consistent but not perfectly - She goes over the sounds they make.

People learn this when they're five?

They usually make a lot of mistakes at first.

I bet! Okay. 

She haltingly tries reciting the sounds back.

They're easier to pronounce not in isolation. Here's how I'd be inclined to spell your name - She writes out "Luthien". T and H together do the "th" sound it's really dumb.

She tries it.