You can get a little ways with that but not very far, people know 'Feliz Navidad' means 'Merry Christmas' but half of them couldn't tell you which word is which.

She's done some enormously clever things with it here but the Noldor are more inclined towards language-learning to start with...

Yeah. Humans usually need a lot of motivation to learn a language.

Humans seem to need more motivation to do things, in general. 

Investing time in a thing is allocating a scarcer resource.

We've got to change that.

Can't scare me.

Long run I'm most optimistic about finding some psionic way of speeding up artifacts and then making ones that forestall aging - it should be possible -

Prior to falling through the portal my best hope was that eventually there would just be enough mages to go around...

If mages can only do de-aging, not stopped aging, you'd eventually run past their capacity - number of mages would grow as a fixed share of the population and the number of de-agings needed per year would grow faster -

Not quite, because most people who eclipse don't actually stick with it. One in two thousand people could be a mage and if all of those people learned de-aging they could keep up easily. They just don't want to suffer through control training and the ones who do don't all learn that skill.

Making control training pleasanter would help a lot but I don't see an angle there.

There's people working on it, improving the psionic tech - the virtuality's quite pleasant really but it'd be better if there were a way to fool a person's magic without having to immerse them in a hallucination, if they could walk around and eat real food and so on simultaneously.

How exactly is fooling the magic relevant -

The virtuality tech sets things up so when you do uncontrolled magic, you do it to the virtuality and not the real world, and keeps all the kids psionically isolated so the psions don't just leak effects onto everyone else who's in it with them. Eclipsed almost never directly hurt ourselves with uncontrolled magic - mages sometimes do indirectly, like, if one sets their house on fire they are then in a house that's on fire, but even though the eclipsed is in the virtuality with themself the risk is negligible that they'll do magic to themself.

And there's no way to make the time until they have control  shorter -

Not that we know of.

What about time dilation that's only subjectively two years, if peoples' reluctance has to do with missing the lives of their loved ones -

Might appeal better to some people - would cut down on how much correspondence they'd get from the loved ones though -

We don't have a way to do it without a Vala, either, and I don't want to be too dependent on them.

Not something artifacts or songs might do?

Artifacts can do anything in principle but that's a hundred Years out if we had my mother on it, I expect.

Drat. Even psion-boosted? I can eidetic her now, for one...

And she'll love you for it, but I doubt it'd speed the project that much, it's just a very hard problem.

Fair enough.