too much of a good thing?

Maybe it was coming down with a virus plus persistent cough, maybe it was just exhausting the resources of the local town, but about ten days ago I felt that I had hit a wall.  I wasnt and still am not making much progress with my Hungarian... constantly the same problems with misplaced accents and double consonants and mixing up A versus Á, somewhat like saying shit instead of sheet  I am reasonably ok when dealing with new concrete vocabulary..objects, colors, tzpes of motion..something that i can put into a mental video... But abstract vocab is particularly elusive.. virtue, honor, justice, and the like.  i have been trying to learn the equivalent for VIRTUE for about two weeks now... it just took me about 6 full seconds to bring it to the surface.  My mnemonic for the word is a KEY... i know the word for key, which is KULCS.  The word for virtue is ERKÖLCS, so my mental process is three steps-- remember the key, change the vowel, put the ER in front.  But if it takes me 6 seconds to bring up a word in conversation, I am doomed.

In a somewhat typical day I am doing abbout 4 or 5 hours of Hungarian.  At breakfast time I read and do vocabb for abouut 1.5 hrs.  I head downtown on my bike, get coffee and a snack at aa café, then over the next several hours I am either at one of the schools or at the library.  If library, then I read for abbout an hour.  Latest reading pleasure--the last two months of the local paper for 1989.. the paper was the organ of the regional communist party.. like a mini Pravda.  Up through 20 Dec the main articles are all about Ceaucescu..His trip to Berlin, visitors from Iran, His speech to a party congress, his visit to a factory.  Any trip he takes includes the hour and minute of departure, the hour and minute of arrival, the names of people on the trip with him, who greeted him, etc.  So he takes this trip to Berrlin around 15 October 1989, meets Honneker, gives a speech, etc etc, all is reported faithfully.  I scan the papers for the next severral weeks...absolutely no mention of anything happening in Germany..nothing about the wall, the collapse of goverrnment, nothing.  Instead Nicolai is off to another event, greeting the workers at factory X, encouraging greater production of wheat or whatever.  On 17 December there were protests in Timisoara, medium sized town close to Hungarian border.  News in the paper a couple of days later consists of a transcript of a TV-Radio address bz Nicolai, warningg about foreign agitators and subversive elements, with special mention of Hungarians as the nasty guuzs (Hungary having precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall during the previous summerr when it effectively stopped blocking people from travel