I’ve never read War and Peace (I have read Anna Karenina and Resurrection in English translation); but Tolstoy is my probably favourite writer just for works like Hadji Murat and the Death of Ivan Illyich. Probably the best thing I’ve ever read is the first half of the Forged Coupon (although I didn’t find the second half convincing).
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Thank you for the kind words, Aran. I did mean “mate” in a neutral way, I use it all the time (as I said above, the dismissive version is “pal” for me); but I am a native speaker of British English. 
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Oh, wait, what?! I thought you were from the continent somewhere The older I get, the more easily confused I become!
I strongly recommend War and Peace. I think it’s the best book ever written by a country mile. I have to work quite hard to remember that other people are allowed to have different opinions 
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Interested to see the Greek on there - I tried to sign in but it didn’t recognise me. Should it be the same login as I use elsewhere for all things SSi, or is the new toy entirely separate for now & needs an ID to be created?
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I had to create a new login. I’m only about an hour into the Greek course, but so far it’s excellent!
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It’s easy to mix up stuff like that with people you don’t know well (especially online) for so many reasons (given your interest in and readings on memory and the brain, I don’t need to list them), so I wouldn’t read much into the mix-up.
Stuff like that happens occasionally IRL and all the time online.
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New toy, new login needed, no tech debt hooray hooray (although you can play without logging in!).
Once we’re confident that the new toy is production ready, we’ll start the long, careful process of inviting people over - we’ve got a bunch of methodological improvements coming for the new toy that would take us years to recreate in the current app, to encourage the move 
@michael-murray that is hugely helpful to know, thank you very much indeed! Generally speaking, if the first hour or so holds up reasonably, it’s a good sign that the course will generally be in good shape
@martin-harte thanks for your patience and understanding! Where do you come from, so I can try to recategorise you in my brain?!
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Originally, the West Coast of Scotland, but I lived in Yorkshire for most of the last quarter century, with 2 years in Spain, 2 years in China and a year each in Manchester and Indonesia mixed in. Currently in Vietnam (about 4 months into a 1-year stint).
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Whoa! Okay, I hereby give myself permission to lose track completely of your unusually high mobility
[which means you’re now filed as ‘a wandering Scot’] 
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I’ve been giving this a brief try using Dutch, while I wait for Breton to become available. Or Icelandic…
So far, very usable except that I discovered, using the original SSiW app, that I am an aural learner and have stuck with that process, rarely using the screen. I use the app while waking my dog (who is now a competent Welsh listener 
) and keep my phone in my pocket. I don’t use headphones and with the Web app I can’t find a way to keep it playing when the screen locks. I have tried using the car setting and also the headphones setting without headphones but the app stops when the screen goes to sleep. Am I missing a setting?
The original app and the current app (v2.0.3) both work fine in this regard. I’m using the latest Japanese course, which has the challenging feel of the deprecated version but with voices which are a vast improvement on the second version. Thank you!
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We’re having some very positive conversations about Breton at the moment - we need some editing, but we also need voice recording - but we’ve got an offer, as soon as we’re ready to give editing/recording access (which we’re working on right now).
I’ll have a squint to see if Icelandic is possible. 
And I’ve asked Tom about the screen lock issue - we certainly thought we had that solved, so with luck it won’t take us too long to crack…
And thank you very much for your thanks! [when I say that to my son Beuno, he says a diolch am ddiolch am ddiolch 
]
Tom says could you let us know what phone you’re using, and the OS? That will help us try to replicate it
I’m using a Samsung A53 5G with Samsung OneUI 8.0 and Android 16.
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Fab, diolch - we’ll get down to testing some stuff
That’s good to hear.
Three are three languages that I’ve wanted learn since childhood/adolescence; Welsh since first hearing my great-grandmother speak it (it was lost at her generation 
), Icelandic since being enthralled by a novel set in Iceland and Japanese from an early love of judo, aikido and kendo as well as reading and seeing the excellent Shogun by James Clavell (a former pupil of my school, though somewhat before me!). Thanks to SSi I’m conversational in the first and getting to grips with the third. It wouldn’t have happened without SSi and I look forward to being able to try the remaining one.
Diolch o waelod fy nghalon!
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Diolch o galon am dy eiriau caredig iawn 
Tom thinks if you try it again now, it should be solved - apparently Android does some funny stuff with switching off audio, but he thinks it’s working now.
And the Icelandic build is not behaving particularly well, but we’ll get there, hopefully this week.
I want to revisit Japanese - we decided that the global changes we made after Ireland were strong enough to fix for Japanese as well, instead of the super simplified version we spun up at some point - but I need to go back and work through it again and see how it’s stacking up - I still feel we may need to do some custom work there. We’ll get there, though And I loved Shogun as well!
I tried again. It did tell me that there was an update, which I installed, but it has made no difference.
I should have mentioned that I’m using Firefox 148.0.2.
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Thanks, I’ve passed that on - our next stab at it might take a little longer, because we’ve got a few other things cooking right now - but definitely this week or next week
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Okay, we’re looking into a code fix, but we believe that Firefox on Android has a setting to ‘allow background audio’, which might be the fastest way forwards for you…
We also think that if you open the app one time in Chrome and then tap the three dots menu, choose ‘Add to Home screen’ (we don’t think Firefox allows this) and then in future open from the app icon, the background audio should persist correctly