TheAdvisor10

==Chapter 10 - The Advisor==
FSS Kentares NR-001
Kentares- Class Corvette / Ram Ship
3155
[38 days into the trip back to the Federated Suns...]
"Vous devez vous rappeler le sexe du nom, Anh."  Francois said patiently.  He wasn't feeling patient.  She was grasping written French well enough,  almost like anyone raised with two other Romance languages. 
Her problems with pronunciation weren't getting better-she was mispronouncing in French as badly as she did German, Spanish, or English, but he was beginning to catch on to something about her speech patterns. After more than a month of daily work.
"Plus lentement.  Pensez à ce que vous essayez de dire." he coached her, then he shifted to English, "Don't hurry so much."
She took in a deep breath, while the enlisted watched for her inevitable outburst.  "C’est tellement frustrant, lieutenant! rien n’est orthographié comme ça sonne!"
It wasn't the blowup he expected, her tone was frustration and despair.
"Vous pouvez calculer les points de saut interstellaires dans votre tête.  si vous vous concentrez de la même façon, vous pouvez accomplir cette tâche!" he chided her.  "I have seen you do it. How can learning to speak what you can write with ease be so difficult?"
"Ah Don' KNOW!!" she burst out in that bastardized english dialect.
"Slow down."  he urged her, "You were doing well until you started to speed up.  Learning a new language isn't easy or everyone would be doing it."
Still, as poor as her french was, it was better than the dialects of English or German she grew up with.
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