What's more you can say: 等等，你去看医生了吗？ 等一下，你去看医生了吗？ with a simple gesture interrupting your conversation

The articles at baike.baidu.com are not necessarily writen by experts in a certain field, so they may not be sutiable for a serious learner. As Chinese I never saw the need to know the pronounciations of the redicals(it's ok if you know them, bu I doubt there are many people who can tell you the pronounciations of all the redicals). I know you can look up characters by their redicals, so in my opinion learning to identify which parts are the redicals of the characters is more important.

Yes, 繁体字 are beautiful. But by simplifying them we can assign them more meaning, otherwise we may have to invent more and more characters. For example, you know 听 is also a quantifier(from english "tin"), you can say 一听可乐. And yes it's hard to imagine 听 is tin but I suppose it's even harder to imagine 聽 is tin. That's how things have advanced.

As far as I know, I can't tell how the lauguages are sorted in the Chinese version of italki, but you can filter by typing in Chinese characters of the lauguages(type in 牙 to find 葡萄牙语, 西班牙语...). For the places, they are seemly sorted by their English names, and you also filter by typing in letters(treated as English, not Pinyin). If a big list of names are sorted, it's a common option to do it by Pinyin, if not required to be sorted by something else(id numbers, scores).

Try this site: http://www.gushi365.com/yuyangushi/ They are called 寓言故事(yu4 yan2 gu4 shi), difficult, but generally shorter and interesting.

Before I wrote this I saw Ke Gao's answer to your problem and I think it's right to the point so there was no need to repeat it, but since you also said you did not find it so I just put the looking up procedure here in case it may be helpful.

Redicals(部4首3) are generally sorted by the numbers of strokes(画hua4) they contain. The characters with a certain redical are generally listed under it, sorted by the number of strokes they contain excluding the redical. For 楼(lou2), the redical is 木(mu4), which contains 4 strokes. So you go to redical 木, then you count the number of strokes of 楼 excluding redical 木, that's 9. You will find 楼 in the characters listed under 九画(9 strokes). Go to list of redicals(部bu4首shou3目mu4录lu4)(You generally find it in the first pages of a dictionary) Find 四画 You see these under it ... 日 another redical 木 you find redical 木 here ... Go to redical 木 Find 九画 You see these under it ... 楂 another character 楼 you find 楼 here ... If it's clear, try it to see if you can find 楼.