I'm in Thailand right now, and this vacation has helped put in perspective things that are important to me. The fact is, I've been running out of steam in Russian. This is due to the war between Russia and Ukraine. Russia blames it on the US, and Ukraine feels the US didn't keep it's promise to protect them. Whether these things are true or not are irrelevant, because these strong feelings exist and they have greatly reduced my motivation to learn the language. So I have taken a nice long break from Russian and learned Thai while I'm here. This vacation is coming to an end, and I've decided to do a lengthy spurt in Mandarin when I get home, which has been my problem child for several years now, rather than revert back to Russian. My Mandarin writing is pretty bad right now. For example, I wrote 12 incorrect characters in 2 lines in my first text. I must improve. It's very strange, but I can type Chinese much much better then I can handwrite it. This is the opposite of all my other languages (except Japanese). So you are going to see some very simple texts, because sometimes I struggle to remember which character to use when I handwrite. On the other hand, typing is easier because several characters pop up after I type the pinyin, and all I have to do is choose the correct one.
