:(

"And if you specialize in song-spells, probably you are incantations track and not artificing anyway..."  Wait no that's backwards.  Small talk is even worse in Mandarin.  "Do you think one gets musical instruments for shop homework, then?  Dangerous to get wrong, but so are many things."

"I mean, you have to, right? I guess you can sell them if you don't do song-spells yourself."

"Mm.  And someone who specializes in song-spells could rather have a thing made by an artificer who didn't, instead of spending their own time on it and not on practice."

"Gains from trade."

"Are you in intro economics?"

"Mn."

What does 'Mn' mean.  She can attempt small talk with a yes or a no but she does not have a script in any language for Schrodinger's Syllable.  If she thinks about this too much longer she is going to get herself stuck again and then Shanghai will definitely notice just in case Friday wasn't bad enough- nope nope focus distract herself.  Textbook?  Textbook!

...she starts a column on the other side of her paper for 'words to look up later'.

His Mandarin is entirely conversational but that still leaves the question of what to have conversations ABOUT. Which is hard enough in English. Maybe he can find something interesting to talk about in the course material. He skims the table of contents for anything he could potentially sustain intelligent conversation with a normal person about.