So I'm mucking around in DF again, and decide to make a "linguist" character, taking all the languages (Daedric, Harpy, Impish, etc.) as skill picks. They never seem to increase ever! Why?

I must have run into dozens of orcs, a handful of centaurs, and some odd dragonlings, yet neither of these creatures' respective language skills goes up at all. This is with the difficulty dagger at 0.3 (i.e. the bottom - easiest skill advancement). What gives. I tried the same with a non-linguist (i.e. these skills were misc. and the difficulty dagger was again at 0.3), but nothing. I tried putting away my weapon and talking to them, but it just says something like "You see an Orc".

Do I need the "comprehend languages" skill? Do they just never increase?

Sorry for going on about this, but I wanted to gauge the feasibility of maxing out ALL of a character's skills, yet I'm stuck on the languages since I can never even get them to increase by a single point!

And an unrelated question.... Is there a way to slow down the messages just a little? I want to be able to read all of the skills that increased, but it kind of just flashes too fast.