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I was in a fairly similar situation in a quantum physics lab class many moons ago. The laborations were "lead" by whatever postgrad students the institution had at hand. Many of them were from abroad, so we had to communicate in English. This was no problem until the Chinese guy came along. We had had some problems with the results of our final lab and the nice French guy who had lead us on that went home, so Chinese Guy had to take over. And he was no help at all, because we could not speak to eachother. He'd point at a plotted curve in our report and say "Wrong! Wrong! Do over!" and we'd say "Yes we know, but we've been over our calculations ten times at least and can't find where the error is. Could you perhaps give us at least a hint about where we went wrong?" and he'd answer "Do over!". I don't know if he was too busy to deal with us, or didn't want to help us for some strange didactic reason, or if it was the language barrier.
Between exam periods, the death of my lab partner's mother and Unhelpful China Man it took us five months to get passed and I don't think we ever figured out where the error was. We just "polished" some measurements so the plotted curve looked acceptable. A learning experience, for sure.
That response letter is pure poetry! How does he write reports and articles?
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