Hi @Reineke!
I like when someone disagrees with me and offers me solid motivations. And in full Dutch spirit, you don't shy away from speaking your mind frankly, and that I appreciate of you!
A "little point on the i": I looked for tutors in Italki only but I didn't think about looking for them on different channels. As far as I know life in Israel is extremely expensive and salaries much higher than the American and European counterparts. My guess is that the expensive ones are located in Israel and the cheap ones are second language speakers.
A second little point on the i (puntino sulla i, it means taking the smallest detail and be picky about it, thing the Italians are good in, sorry
) is that I actually speak Spanish fluently and I can actually write it, even if accuracy can vary from good to maccaroni, but in principle I can fly to Spain tomorrow, have a job the day after tomorrow and use Spanish on a daily basis, for work and any possible activity with little problems (of course taking advantage of exposure to bring my skills to a whole new level).
Said that, I love the Romance languages, they offer me huge reward and little challenge. My biggest challenge is indeed the little challenge as I can go the fun fun way and avoid sweat and tears that were always present during my Dutch challenge.
Non transparent languages mean even more sweat and tears, so:
- romance languages are S&T level 0, with exception of Romanian
- germanic languages S&T level 1, with exception of Icelandic
- Russian is for me S&T level 2
- Hebrew and Arabic S&T are for me level 3 because of their vowelless alphabets
My problem is that I want the fun and I want to avoid the S&T. With Dutch I could force myself because the benefits were too high and too urgent and too practical to ignore them. With the other languages I take the ratio benefits/S&T very seriously (with "fun" and "intellectual pleasure being part of the benefits).
You say:
My best guess is that you are bored.
You're right! But despite that, choosing another language will not benefit me, because I don't have a big desire about it or I'm too afraid of that perceived difficulty.
Portuguese will benefit me greatly because it's a big language and it is easy, but I rather avoid to go for this way now because I prefer to put it between two difficult languages to get some sort of "active rest".
Now for Russian is easy, it's the language that I desire the most to learn in this moment, and in my schedule since two years already, and my interest always come back. Plus, I already started do something with it and I fell even more in love.
If I have to follow my heart, I should stop everything and restart Russian.
Hebrew is a fortunate mistake. A mistake because the reasons I started to study it are weak. Fortunate because I discovered that I like the language and I can benefit from learning it (if it were a language isolate I would definitely stop with it). Now, even if my reasons to continue with it are as weak as the ones to start it, I have huge resistance to stop with it, for a series of equally weak motivations:
- I already spent (little) study time for it
- I already spent (little) money for it
- I want to stop wanderlusting as my experience with Dutch taught me that the fun will eventually arrive once I sweat enough bloody tears
- I prefer to start new languages in January, with a new log and a "I will not start new languages compulsively" new year's resolution
- I want to temper my spirit by persevering even when the light at the end of the tunnel is super far away and the experience is autopunishing
- I will be a better learner for $nextLanguage once I'm satisfied with my current focused Hebrew studies
So for now is Hebrew till burn out.