I would have to agree with quidity on this. First, you would need to teach someone what a regex is. Then, how they would represent it with your defined subset of English, then what the final product means. Seems like an uneeded step. Basically, it is like having to learn OmniRegex, in order to learn Regex.. when noone else uses OmniRegex. :)

I learned the mastery of regex's by reading MRE, and literally sitting around figuring out how to get/match pieces of strings. I would propose this as a better tool to teach REs...

Give a string(s), then give problems, such as:
* Use a RE to find how many occurences of 'X' are in the string
* Use s!!! to substitute the first occurence of 'X' with 'Y'
* Use s!!! to substitue the second occurence (only) of 'X' with 'Y'
* Use an RE to see if the string 'X' can be matched in 'Y', disregarding quotes..
* etc...

Basically, that's what I did (as well as reading MJD's article on how the RE engine works, and other topical articles). And, I think that it worked quite well.. I haven't struggled with REs ever since.

I would be happy to help anyone come up with such exercises. Just ask if anyone wants to do it.

Cheers,
KM