jesteryte

Hi. Thanks for doing this AMA. I heard that while you were playing Dr. Greene, you had the opportunity to direct several ER episodes, and that love of directing led you to leave the show. Were you involved in the decision to write in the brain tumor? Was there a reason a brain tumor was chosen rather than a different method of death? For a show that confronted mortality nearly every episode, I found Dr. Greene's death very affecting.

And to give a very talented actor a multi-dimensional role to inhabit. But I can't help but think that to act the progression of a terminal illness would be an unsettling experience, at least sometimes. Was it, or was it just all in a day's work?

Wow! This is really interesting. I've studied Japanese to a intermediate level, Chinese to a basic level, and am now in process of bringing my Spanish to intermediate fluency. It's astounding the difference it makes to be able to pick up a book in Spanish and learn words from context, vs. how in Japanese and Chinese you pretty much have to memorize characters before you can hope to understand new words you encounter that contain them. I'd love to hear your take on the relative difficulty of these languages and what characteristics make them easier/harder to acquire.

Could you explain the process you go through when you learn a language? I understand about viewing a number as a color - like visualizing pi as a multicolor horizon of dips and peaks - that makes sense to me - but how does that work for language? Do you imagine the grammatical structure as a landscape, does it look colorful to you? How would you break down the process of visualizing language to someone who doesn't naturally understand languages in that way?

The US Military (and perhaps State Department?) classifies languages by difficulty, according to the number of hours it usually takes to get to a specific level of proficiency, but it's starting from a base as a native English speaker. I think it's a pretty good way to classify difficulty of second language acquisition, but it's interesting and potentially interesting to know which factors make a language harder or easier to learn for someone.