Derek Thornton (former blog here) reports in the FLEFO forum of CompuServe (click on Nachrichten, then English/ESL/EFL):
As the French Ambassador to the United Nations said in English today in New York on the subject of a prime minister for Iraq:
“We are not going to speculate on a Mr. ‘icks or a Mr. E. Greck.”
Letter-names are right up there with numbers, for me. IPlaying hangman in French as an exchange student I lost every time because I was restricted to letters I knew, and this was by no means an adequate supply.
Interpreters spend a lot of time practising numbers: dates, phone numbers, prices. These are the things, like letters, that you see in a foreign text and recognize, so you don’t learn them well, and they clog up the brain when you’re trying to interpret.