Carrick was more pleased than his emotionless expression would suggest. "Your name, yes."
He paused for a moment, thinking of how to continue. He picked up the pen again and added slashes through the words to denote a separation of syllables.
"It's a good place to start because your name, like mine, is largely phonetic. It's spelt as it sounds. Now, you can think of each syllable as a building block in the creation of an entire word or sentence."
He underlined the long e in 'Hermes'. "Some say English is a tricky language. Here, you have the same letter as before, but it's pronounced with what we call a long e as opposed to the short one here." He tapped the first syllable. "Do you follow?"