"Try to Remember" is a short story... about 65 pages short.

Jon... I believe you speak of the difference between speaking a foreign language and communicating using a language that may at first seem "foreign" to you. Yet the underlying concept of congruence of intent remains the same for all of us, regardless the path or method we choose to merely verbalize our mental images.

Most mental images are beyond words, ergo most communication is beyond words. It's like just teaching what a hammer is for instead of how to use it correctly. And for the purposes of this thread, this website, and the magic tricks we do, the same holds true.

My wife taught lil' kids and often she would have parents roll in with a kid who spoke nothing but Chinese and the parents would say "teach english". It is amazing how quickly the lil' kid would learn English and I think for the most part they already understood a lot of it but just never had the opportunity to use it until getting around the English speaking kids. What was funny was the school was mostly Indian with the rest Asian and a few 'other' kids. All my wifes kids at the end of the year are running around with a Boston accent and the other teacher at the same grade levels kids all had Indian accents like the teacher. Since the Indian parents prefered my wife it was the little 'other' kids with the Indian accents! One of the most interesting kids was a little blond haired blue eyed girl who only spoke Japanese. Her mom was Japanese and her dad a honkified mo fo and the little girl looked just like dad but mom only spoke Japanese to her and so did the father. It confused the kids because to them she looked like she should speak English.