"...huh. I think it makes writing spells easier for us but not especially learning new ones, there are so many stylistic differences anyway between different composers."

"It's like--imagine a spell is a color by numbers--do you know what a color by numbers is."

"...is it... a cross between a connect the dots and a coloring book?"

"Sort of. So the way color by numbers works is, there's a bunch of discrete fairly simple shapes, and each one has a number in it, and at the bottom there's a key, like, one equals yellow, two equals green, etcetera. And then when you color in all the shapes with their assigned colors you get the picture. Or the color version of the picture; a lot of the time you can see a lineart version pretty well from just the shapes. Anyway, in this metaphor, if a spell is a color by numbers, then if you know theory, then it's like--knowing the color-number correspondences and being able to look at the picture and fill in the colors in your head and get the numbers that way. And if you don't know theory then you just have to memorize all the numbers."

"...it's easier to remember spells that rhyme? I think maybe ours are just different. Should we teach you some basic wizard spells?"

"--Yeah let's do that."

"Let's see, I think 'stuff I could cast in my first semester out of affinity' is probably the equivalent of rank zero... trouble is most of it is not remotely useful or even particularly testable under these pleasant conditions..."

"Freshman year I had a spell to - oh, what languages do you guys speak, that's important."

"Oh, yeah, it is, if it's just English - and Chinese as the case may be - that's another filter to apply in our selection."

"I speak a little German and high school Spanish?"

"I have some Hokkien and a little Japanese."

"Some German and some Spanish, and the smattering of Latin you pick up by noticing etymology in medical terms." 

"I have like a little vestigial French but am mostly an embarrassingly stereotypical monolingual American. I can pronounce Mandarin reasonably well for having no idea what I'm saying, though, apparently!"

"...well, definitely don't pronounce spells without knowing what you're saying, that's a good way to blow yourself up. Spell-competency is like, you don't have to be fluent and especially don't have to be able to generate novel sentences on your own but you have to know what all the words and grammatical components of the spell mean, for it to be wise to try casting it; we say someone is 'spell competent' in a language when a new spell viewed cold is pronounceable and the grammar is clear on a second reading but it's okay if you need a dictionary for some words. Unless it's French, they write spells you've got to toss off like it's a clichéd aphorism or something, I don't know why it's like that and none of the native Francophones could explain it either."

"Well if your francophones don't know I bet ours don't have a clue."

"Wouldn't expect them to. Anyway, sticking to languages y'all will be able to finesse..." She thinks for a bit, and eventually she settles on the standard make-and-mend from Shop, writes it out for them.

Caio has a sanitation spell he used to clean his water condenser every few days. It doesn't cover much area but it's very thorough.

She studies the make-and-mend for a moment, pulls a pencil out of her sleeve and snaps it, and holds the ends together and says the spell. 

Nothing happens. 

"Maybe it would work if I had any idea what was supposed to...happen, in the magic, as a result of saying the spell?"

"Do you mean what intent you need to have for it?"

"Or can you like directly see magic or something?"

"I can't directly perceive magic out in the world but when I'm directly interacting with it I can feel it? I can feel how much mana I have and how much I'm putting into a kiss or your power storage and I can sort of feel how much is in there when I'm taking some out and I can feel what mana I'm manipulating one way or another is doing when I'm manipulating it."

"That's normal for witches, there are apparently differences in how sorceresses and academics and warlocks perceive it but they're differences on the order of, like, paying attention to different things, not totally different sensory modalities."

"We can feel how much mana we have and are spending and so on but I'm not sure what you mean by 'what happens in the magic'. Do you want one of us to demonstrate?"

"Like she said, we don't really have external magic perception so I'm not sure it would help. It's like--when you burn calories to run, the thing that is happening is that your cells are burning calories to contract to make your muscles move to push yourself off against the floor? It's not just, chemical energy spontaneously transforms into kinetic energy, there's specific stuff happening, and it's different specific stuff than how, like, a car, turns chemical energy into kinetic energy? And if you're doing things the academic way you need to know how cars work and how muscles work but even if you're a sorceress you still need to learn how to walk and how to drive."

"...huh. I don't think we exactly have that. Maybe because we're born wizards and don't 'awaken', it just comes more naturally?"