Incidentally, he was taken aback the first time I showed him any linguistic analysis of Chinese. He had had Chinese language instruction--his parents are native speakers and he spent most of his growing-up in international schools in China and Malaysia--and can read and write it, but he's never really had the same degree of analysis of it as he's had in English as part of his education. So when I exlpained and illustrated that most Americans couldn't tell the difference between his surname (Zheng) and several similar-sounding Chinese words, he was flabberghasted.