After speaking with the villagers of Rude Village and failing to learn anything about the magical beasts occupying the mine, Chuan Wenwu and his companions left under the villagers' hopeful gazes and returned to the room they had booked at the village's only inn.
Since they were in an unfamiliar place and Raphtalia's panic disorder had yet to be cured, Chuan Wenwu decided against having everyone rest separately. For safety's sake, he rented a shared room so they could all stay together and look out for one another.
It also made it easier for him to supervise Raphtalia and Bruce's studies. In this other world, there was no television, no computer, no phone... none of the countless forms of entertainment he knew. Once darkness fell, there was nothing to do unless they went to bed early, so they might as well use these hours-not too early, not too late-to try learning this world's written language.
Chuan Wenwu took out the Basic Lexical Dictionary he had bought at the magic bookstore, set it on the desk in their room, and called Raphtalia and Bruce over with their chairs to study together.
Learning a language from scratch was undoubtedly difficult. Forming connections with unfamiliar characters required sustained memorization in the first place.
Fortunately, they were not starting entirely from nothing. Thanks to the Shield of the Hero's special effect, both he and Bruce benefited from its real-time translation. Whenever they heard this world's language, a translation into a language they understood appeared directly in their minds. That gave them a foundation in listening and speaking. All they had left to do was match the sounds to each of the otherworldly characters in the dictionary, memorize each character's pronunciation and meaning, and expand their vocabulary.
In a sense, learning this world's language might