i love that this story is 100 years old. people ask me how it is possible to live in china without speaking chinese, but i literally experienced the same thing in china and any other country that i have been to. heck even on a market where you don't serve yourself, i can point at the items that i want, even if i don't know the names.
it was in fact this very experience that made me realize that i can live in other countries without having to learn the local language before going there.
I spent most of my adulthood time in Europe talking to non-Roman speaking languages like German, French, Bosnian, Magyar.
First thing to realize about non-Roman languages is that non-Roman doesn't equal Latin. It helps but eventually you're gonna need to learn Russian, Magyar, German.
