Answer: Ask her/him to read a piece of music.
Reading standard music notation is an important skill which is often neglected by guitarists. There are many incredible guitar players who never learned how to read music, but they were not incredible guitar players because they never learned how to read music.
It amazes me that this is such a hot topic among guitar teachers: http://acousticguitarclub.ning.com/group/teachers/forum/topics/teaching-students-to-read
Reading music is not a secret that should only be understood by a select group of musicians. The challenge is that it requires learning seemingly random relationships which must be performed in consistent time. This task becomes simple when concepts are isolated, repeated and applied to good-sounding tunes.
Music is a language. I don't think about the names of each letter when I read because I learned the alphabet when I was a child. If I didn't know how to read, I would still be able to function in society, but I would spend a lot more time figuring things out. I think it's amazing that our brains can take the building blocks and express countless thoughts and feelings through sentences, or musical phrases.
If you have a good teacher, you will stay motivated, and in just a few months you will have a valuable skill which will expand your musical options profoundly for the rest of your life. I don't understand why people who claim to love music and the guitar but are so opposed to learning more about music by studying the standard form of music notation that dates back hundreds of years. Think of all the music they could play, if they could only read it.
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