Reader and old friend Valerio posted a comment on my Osmosis blog (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/03/osmosis.html) about a talk that he had attended as a graduate student, hearing the speaker saying, "...it's one of those things that you learn by osmosis in this field". Valerio, himself a maths professor now, said in his comment on my blog: "I began imagining me becoming as knowledgeable as him just by waiting for the knowledge to trickle down into my brain in a rather passive way..."
For the full context of the above, see the Comments section of https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/03/osmosis.html.
I was just going over this in a lesson recently.
One of the students in the group (mostly octogenarians) had read the Chinese for 12 o'clock (十二点 shí èr diǎn / "ten two o'clock") as 2 o'clock (二点 èr diǎn / "two o'clock"). She said she has trouble processing 十二 shí èr / "ten two" and 二十 èr shí / "two ten".
I cited (yet again to this group) my practice of running through, aloud, numbers in French when going up/down the stairs to/from my first floor flat, with one set of seven steps and one of eleven. I can recite numbers in French now without having to think, but only up to eleven.
(London, 2026)
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