Help with Geneforge 1 *Mid-Game Spoilers?*

[FrozenZade]

Hey all. So I'm playing through and I've come to a stumbling block. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong, and when I looked up a FAQ it sounds like my game might have gotten bugged or something. Hopefully not. Here's the story.

Got to Masha in the Refugee caves on the east end of the island, I haven't allied myself with any of the Servile factions yet. I spoke with Masha and did her key quest and she supposedly taught me some of the Sholai tounge, and gave me a letter to deliver to Astrov north of Pentil. I went to Astrov and gave the letter to Sniff to get in the door, but when I tried to speak to Astrov I couldn't understand him and couldn't progress further. I've tried talking to all the other peaceful Sholai I can find and the only ones I can speak with are Masha and the merchant in the Refugee Caves (Sholaya I think?).

Talked with Masha more, talked with the Serviles around both camps, nobody seems able to teach me more of the language and I can't speak to Astrov or anyone else in his base. The FAQ I read acted like you could just talk to Astrov right away.

So am I missing something? Is there some bug I've hit upon? Do I have to find more peaceful Sholai to learn more the language first?

Any help anyone can give would be greatly appreciated.


EDIT: After doing additional research, apparently a number of others have had this problem. Looks like the solution is to seek out more Sholai to learn the language better. I thought that could be it but since it didn't make sense in a game-theory perspective (get questline, get part of language, told to seek Astrov, Astrov not know understandable).