Do I need my wallet seed phrase to recover my wallet? - cant I just sync with the blockchain on a new PC , enter wallet name and password?
The wallet name is just a file name and the password is used to encrypt the file. Neither is sufficient to recover a wallet. You need the seed words or private keys (view key and spend private key in hex) to recover a wallet.
In the future - can we generate a seed in our native language ? - i.e. chineese or hindi?
Chinese is already supported I believe and other languages can be added by submitting a pull request to github (or sponsoring someone to do so).
EDIT: I just looked in github and apparently Chinese is not supported. I remembered there being a discussion about it a while back so I thought it had been added by now, but apparently that hasn't happened yet.
What is the .keys file for that came with the simplewallet and all of that stuff?
The keys file contains the private keys and also can give you the seed words (if the wallet is deterministic). A backup of the .keys file is sufficient to recover the coins in the wallet.
I have got a wallet up and running by usining bitmonerod to sync then running simplewallet...im wondering what all the other files in this folder are for?
The other files hold a cache of some parts of the blockchain used by the wallet along with your transaction history. You won't lose your coins if you lose those files but it is good to keep them for the history part.
- when I start_mining 3 - do funds auto send to my wallet or do I need to set up where the miner pays me? - with intel core i7 processor and nvidia gtx1080 what setting shall I use when start_mining? 1,2,3,4? - or higher?
start_mining will send the funds to you wallet if and when you find a block. With only 3 threads it will take quite a while most likely (this is solo mining). Also the built in wallet/daemon miner only supports CPU. To mine on the GPU you will need to use a GPU miner (see the "getting started" page on most pools). Personally I have always liked the idea of pool mining with the GPU and solo mining with the CPU. The former gets you regular consistent payouts and the latter helps support the decentralization of the network and will occasionally (or more often if you are lucky) pay you a bunch more coins.