how do we know he doesn't know those basic phrases?

Well, the joke is, even if he didn't before he got on the plane, he's spent 4 weeks on an island where English is the default and pretty damned necessary for survival. Of course he's learned some English, as anyone would, hearing nothing but all day long and needing to know what it means.

I mean, he might have learned only "cave" and "doctor" and "asshole", but those are three very useful words!

I think Jin's using the lack of a common language as a way to keep himself and Sun separate from the others, and actively avoided learning English in order to keep up that protective barrier.

Oh, I agree in general, and that would explain why he's still at the single-word stage, instead of picking up whole phrases. But, like, when somebody borrows his fishing net, after a certain while, mime plus words gives those words meaning. You can't really help that kind of learning.

The human mind is a powerful and scary thing, though. If you didn't want to learn a language, you could probably convince yourself you hadn't, and forget whatever you *had* picked up.

I don't know, LJ -- that sounds like something that requires a serious complex about it, which I'm not seeing in Jin. If you're interacting with a language every day, and we've seen that he is, most of the time you can't help but learn bits of it. Refuse to use those bits, yes. (That can be a form of power, speaking or not speaking; as Sun demonstrated yesterday.) Enact psychological gymnastics akin to repressed memory in order not to learn them in the first place? Hard for me to believe.

Sun and Jin were married for years. That dog she received as a puppy was grown by the time they departed on the trip to Sydney.

Was it still a puppy when Jin came home covered in blood? I think that's what's confusing me, when that scene happened. I guess there could have been years of Jin growing increasingly hard and carrying out worse errands before he went to see his father that we just didn't see.

I am not bothered by the language thing. not on any logical basis, per se, it just doesn't bother me.

I think that's where I got confused. Jin looks sternly at the man and takes his puppy. Jin talks to Sun with full grown dog in the background. Sun's daddy is all "you need to learn how to deliver a message." What, now?

[As a sidenote, though, the puppy could easily have grown that much over the course of several months, so it's not necessarily as long a stretch as all that.]

Was it still a puppy when Jin came home covered in blood? I think that's what's confusing me, when that scene happened.

It would have had to be, because that scene couldn't have taken place more than a week or two after the first "message" was delivered.

[eta:

Jin talks to Sun with full grown dog in the background.

Oh, really? I totally missed that. Huh. Though, as you say, dogs really do grow that fast.]

Sun and Jin were married for years. That dog she received as a puppy was grown by the time they departed on the trip to Sydney.

I'm not sure of the breed of dog but IIRC that type does grow pretty quickly. The length of time could be anywhere from a few months to a few years.