>>At least, with a word you don't know, you know that you don't know it. Words that you know seem so familiar - except that you need to notice that what you know doesn't make much sense.
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>First of all, my compliments on how well you speak in a second (Nth?) language. Most natives don't speak English nearly as well.

Thanks for the kind words, though actually my writing is probably better than my speaking, because at the keyboard I can take a couple of seconds more to remember the right word. I was told that what's confusing in my spoken English is not the accent, which isn't that strong, but me taking a break at unexpected places in a sentence. Until the word emerges :).

And it was my second language indeed, before I started Russian in school (5th grade through college), then two years of Latin in high school, then odds and ends of German, Italian, Dutch and a cursory pass over a bunch of Slavic languages, and then I had to learn Hungarian for real, at the age of 40, which I do count as an achievement :). Anyone (except maybe the Finnish and possibly Estonians) who tries to learn it at that age is probably nuts, and will have a great time :).

My older daughters also speak German, but the youngest one learns French and Japanese, and she's excellent with both - presently going through an additional course so she could skip from 1st semester of it straight into 4th, or maybe even 6th. And she already has the case with French when she doesn't notice in which language the question was :).

>Sure, there are linguistic land mines in any language, English probably more than most. My advice is genuine: write as clearly as you can and then have faith in the reader. If you stop to dot every i and cross every t your reader will quickly fall asleep.

It's easier when I write in English - I compose an English sentence, relying on its idiosyncrasies and navigating zig-zag across the minefield, bridging the gaps with usable phrases and generally doing what one does in a programming language: use any command available to get your code do what you want.

Much harder with a translation. You want to stay as close to the original as you can, and the original is using a different set of tools.

>My younger daughter Emily showed an early flair for writing. (Not bragging, just saying). She showed me a story she had written at school and it was terrific. I said wow, Emmo, this is great. She said she was afraid she had not followed all the rules right. (My daughters are both adorable but very easy to tell apart: one needs to be kicked in the behind on a regular basis and the other can be devastated by an unkind word. Emily is by far her own harshest critic). Anyway, I told her the only real rule of writing is to keep the reader wanting to read more. You can break every rule in the book if you follow that one.

My advice to the young writer, along the same lines, is that the rules in art are the crutches for those who don't want to invent everything from scratch - and their actual purpose is to be broken by those who know what they're doing and why.

>Doo doo doo doo .... cue the Twilight Zone theme song. She just called wanting to know what time I will pick them up tomorrow. I said usual time, 7:15 or 7:30, I'll call you from the cell phone when I'm half an hour away. I can't wait. They give me purpose.

The Latin phrase would be "lupus in fabula", Serbian "we about wolf, and wolf on door". Is there a better translation than "speaking of which"?

Daughters are the best people. I'm glad I met mine :).