My father is a native Russian speaker and his parents preferred to speak it at home, so I heard it all the time growing up. Not only that, I was taught specific phrases (greetings at Easter, that sort of thing). I still managed to never pick any up.

But is that kind of cultural osmosis helpful for conversational speaking? I mean, I've seen enough Chinese movies that there are familiar-sounding words, but I still couldn't ask someone their name, or how to get to the airport. (I could tell them to go fuck themselves, but that's more a side-effect of having a husband and brother-in-law who spent their teenagehoods in Hong Kong.)

Similarly, English-speakers may say things like chibi-Cokes and Jenny-chan, or ciao, or quelle horreur!, or gesundheit, without thinking about it -- but in each case, they're adopting foreign words into their vocabularies.

Ok, but not particularly useful words in this context. The fact that I have a handful of Russian words I can call up to add color to an english sentence would help me communicate not at all if I were stranded on an island with people who spoke only Russian and had absolutely no English.

Hell, I've encountered enough Americans with no useful English that I couldn't assume someone who's actually from a whole different country needs have it.

Nutty, I'm guessing you're facile with languages. You're lucky. Not everyone is, by a long shot.

I've been assuming that in an ambitious country like Korea, children get 8-10 years of English instruction in the schools. If that's not true, then it's possible that Sun had only slight familiarity with English, although it still seems likely that rich daddy would send her to private school so she could reflect his own sophistication when interacting with 'colleagues from Syndney and LA.' Does anyone know about English instruction in Korean schools?

No, of course, not all these words are useful. But like I said, the writers are treating language like an on/off switch. Either you know the language completely, or you don't at all; whereas even a few sessions of "New Coke!" "Hasta la vista baby?" would be realistic.

The proof of it will come next week, if Sun's English is idiomatic and correct, and she never discovers a vocab deficit and lapses back into Korean in the middle of a conversation with an English-only speaker. For that matter, we already have proof: despite some close interactions, and both Sun's and Jin's general usefulness, nobody on the island has learned a single word of Korean.

nobody on the island has learned a single word of Korean.

Walt learned toothbrush or toothpaste (I can't remember which) when Michael went boar-hunting

nobody on the island has learned a single word of Korean.

Hurley knows "Annyong."

nobody on the island has learned a single word of Korean.

Given how isolated Jin has deliberately kept both Sun and himself, that doesn't surprise me.

I agree with you that Sun's proficiency with English is unrealistic, given that she canonically didn't start learning until she was an adult, and (I think it's safe to assume) hasn't been taking lessons for more than a year.

Is it not possible that Jin was deliberately avoiding using English, at all, even if he had a few phrases, because he wanted to keep himself and Sun as a seperate unit of two?

As for other non-native English speakers, Sayid and Rousseau both seem to have a fairly complete grasp of the language. Rousseau perhaps surprisingly, presuming she's been on her own for a long time.