Bloodygoodgames: Sure, I make HUGE allowances for someone asking questions in a foreign language or from a drastically different culture as the ones I grew up i as, heaven knows, most of them often speak a second or third language better than I do :)
Sorry if I implied otherwise. Any halfway decent teacher (or anybody with a lick of common sense) is going to give leeway.
Bloodygoodgames: But, I have had several of the most clueless students imaginable -- students whose parents would come to me exasperated as they couldn't believe their child was this stupid (most of the time they weren't -- just incredibly lazy). And yes, they asked such stupid questions that their friends would even throw things across the classroom at them just to get them to stop talking. :)
My current school has a fair number of rich students that don't really want to learn anything. I'm not sure if when they go to college they're expecting to be able to hire a translator to go about with them constantly or what. But, they're going to be in for a rude awakening when they have to do basic things and can't.
I know I regularly get frustrated because my Chinese is not really good enough. I'm picking it up pretty quickly, but to properly speak it, you really do need to know at least some of the characters. The written language really is the language, the spoken is pretty much just because you don't always have paper and it takes a ton of time to write things.
