That's hell of convenient. Even your ghosts? Those are the ones we got back home that seem most hurt by no one able to understand them and negotiate.

[Dan lights up. It's rare he meets anyone who doesn't consider knowing Common Tongue an annoying oddity, a reason to dismiss him as someone who just cares too much about not shooting to kill every single time.]

It'd be a pleasure. It's difficult, because even though there are only five hundred, six hundred words to learn, the sentence structures are pretty abstract. Kind of like poetry, really. It's just a different way of thinking about language.

[He's illiterate, not uncultured.]