It took eleven days, and in the end James did it wrong, and it worked anyway.
He had a list. Forty signs, learned in the order Sylvie chose, which was not the order any teacher would have chosen — I'm sorry, my name is James, I live upstairs, I am learning, please be slow, Sylvie, help, I saw, night, who — a vocabulary designed for exactly one conversation and useless for any other.