Wow, of all the times to really miss Uhura. Jim frowned a little at the admission. He did okay in the command track's mandatory linguistics class, landed comfortably in the top ten percent, but it was never an area of application he'd been overly concerned with. Honestly, half the reason he'd even signed up for the advanced course was to hit on Uhura.

(That didn't work out so well, but hindsight is 20/20)

Still. He had a half-decent ear for it and he could learn if he needed to, but there's so much else that needed doing here it'd almost be redundant.

"So why don't you get one of the kedan to read it outloud for you? Follow along with the reading material, you'd get it figured out pretty fast."