He's so cute! He bounces!

Tomonori and Nie Huaisang are in the other corner of the reading room, Nie Huaisang draped over Tomonori like a particularly sexy blanket. Tomonori looks uncomfortable or excited or possibly both.

"I think first thing book wants you to do is learn pronunciation?" 

"Sure!" He's been working on that some, mostly by repeating under his breath all the syllables and words he can pick out when listening to Mandarin conversations. It's both harder and less interesting than the codebreaking-exercise of figuring out how to read the characters, but that just means he gets more mana from it, right? 

(Masozi at this point does not have the sounds that characters represent memorized in almost any cases; his notebook contains some attempts at using the International Phonetic Alphabet from when Wei Wuxian was explaining it to him, but to be honest he wasn't fully tracking said explanation, his brain was already so full by then.) 

The book uses Wade-Giles to represent the sounds ("God, this is confusing," Lan Xichen mutters to himself) and Lan Xichen gently guides him through making sure he's pronouncing each of the letters and the tones correctly.

Masozi is very good at paying attention to the lesson! He doesn't have too much trouble with the tones; other aspects of pronunciation are harder, and even when he's trying his best, he can't actually quite manage all the consonant sounds. He's probably going to end up speaking Mandarin with a very strange accent, if he manages to learn it. 

He is really unfairly cute and Lan Xichen has a problem.

The problem is labeled "don't express any sexual or romantic interest in the fourteen-year-old who doesn't like sex and who you have an absurd amount of power over."

After a while, he says, "I kind of want to read you poetry."

"...Okay?" Masozi is vaguely aware that poetry exists but is kind of confused about what it is, exactly. 

"They make us memorize lots of poetry for test to get in. It helps with writing and learning spells, since most of them are also poetry. You learn skills of memorization without having to worry about spellchoking."

"....Oh. Yeah, that makes sense for practice. - I don't think I had very good practice for memorizing things, unless remembering which streets were more or less dangerous is the kind of thing that counts." 

"Oh! Actually I should talk you through making memory palace, to help you remember things."

"Making a...what? Also what's 'spell choking'?" 

"If you try to learn too many spells at same time they get muddled in your head. You get worse at learning them for each new one you add. Some people become anxious, keep trying to learn new spells in case previous ones were too hard, stop feeling like they can learn spells at all, it is whole psychological mess. Then you can't learn any more spells and you die."

"That....seems really stupid?" Probably this isn't a polite or helpful thing to say but Masozi's brain is giving him zero alternate suggestions. "I - if something is too hard but it's really important then you - work harder on it and for longer and you figure out how to make it into ten smaller pieces and learn each of those? You don't just...pretend it's not there...?" 

"That is one theory. Spellchoking doesn't happen often so we aren't really sure why people spellchoke. Another theory is that there's sort of queue and you can only learn so many spells before it fills up and you can't learn any more. --It isn't at all common but it's best to avoid it, and you're at risk because you're learning difficult new language."

"Oh. ....Is Mandarin difficult? I - guess it's more difficult than learning Zulu because it's more different. And it's...easier than learning English, in some ways, but I was younger and - less good at things, when I started trying to learn English." 

"It is considered difficult for English speakers, I don't know about Zulu speakers. Characters are very difficult. I think if you stay with Shanghai we might get Wen Ning to get mana by copying spells into pinyin for you." He looks at the book suspiciously. "...Or apparently Wade-Giles. --Some spells require knowing characters spell is written in but not all of them, and you can just memorize characters if spell is short. I think you'll be okay."

"I like learning the characters! It's like math. It's just hard to remember how to say the sounds right." 

"Average Chinese speaker knows about eight thousand characters? It takes a while to learn."

"......Eight thousand? That's so many!" 

It is just, perhaps, slightly, now occurring to Masozi that he may be out of his depth. 

"School is aware of this and tends to give you spells in pinyin or very simple characters for your first year or two of studying Mandarin."

"Oh. Good." 

Pause. 

"Is it...a normal thing? To decide to learn Mandarin once you get to school? Or do most students either know it before or not want to learn it?" 

"I think most people who are languages track choose easier languages but it isn't that uncommon? There are lots of good spells in Mandarin and lots of native Mandarin speakers."

That sounds slightly evasive but Masozi has no idea what Lan Xichen could be trying to evade! 

"...I'm not languages track?" he says, uncertainly. "I - mean - I don't actually know how I'd know if I was or not - but I think I want to learn artificing the most, it sounds really cool and good?" 

"Mandarin is hard and-- spellchoking is rare but I don't think it's impossible you'll wind up spellchoking learning it?"

"....Yeah." 

Of course it's not impossible. It's been driven very very deeply into Masozi's entire model of the world, over his entire life, that the worst possible things he can imagine are possible - that they can and will happen. He remembers being six years old, and watching his mother grinning and laughing as his older sister played - watching her snuggling the baby, at the time - a baby who died scarcely a year later, or less, he can't even remember - and - knowing that she could and might die, because she wasn't being clever and careful and looking out for her survival and her children's survival first and foremost– 

And now Masozi is kind of upset, and fighting to push it down again, into the corner where all of his feelings have to live until he's strong enough to win all the fights and fix all the problems. But right now he isn't, and - apparently he's also not strong enough to entirely hide the fact that he's having an emotion at all. 

He hopes that Lan Xichen won't notice. 

Lan Xichen gently puts his hand on Masozi's back.

"You won't if you're clever and careful."