Elf Sternberg

I noiced, many years ago, something of the same broken connection between spoken and written French. A lot of the grammatical detail--verb tenses and stuff--are a lot less obvious in spoken French. You can, at least, slur over them.

But my only experience of immersion in a foreign culture is a weekend in the Netherlands for a Worldcon. But I found I could puzzle out the text on the automatic ticket machine in the rail station at Rotterdam with less trouble than understanding people speaking Dutch.