I have come across fuoch chi recently and now know that this construction is to speak about the past but when should it be used and why is it used in certain sentences. Is there a rule about it? At the moment I’m only using it in identical sentence structure (parrot fashion) but don’t know how to transfer its use.
TBH, although I’ve done a couple of ‘gloywi iaith’ courses, I still only use that form in the ‘bu farw’ structure. I recognise it and understand it, but have never got to the point where I use it naturally myself. It’ll happen, I suppose, but you can get quite a long was along being a Welsh-speaker and not have to use it.
I think it’s like ‘dw i’ but when you want to talk about something that happened in the past (but a discrete event that has finished - so not like ‘ron i’, which is ongoing). But more often that not when I want to do that I grasp at ‘wnes i’ instead, which serves the same purpose but uses ‘gwneud’ rather than ‘bod’. I’m hoping my upcoming year of education will expose me to a bit more formal Welsh and I’ll get a better grip on it!
But you know what the short answer is … ‘Don’t worry’! 
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This seems to be popular at the moment. On a thread a few months back it was mentioned that it was a very popular style for short news articles etc, because it is efficient in terms of letters used etc. Spoken Welsh in many areas may be much less driven by a want for word efficiency and other ways of saying more or less the same thing may be more generally preferred?. Personally I really like this form, but I don’t hear it much on TV/Radio etc, but I always suspected that it may be used a lot more in certain areas. I first came across this in the kids song “Fuoch chi 'rioed yn Morio”, which is a really catchy kids song and completely boinkers in terms of the lyrics and I think it made me quite warm to it.
I would like to hear more from people who know people who use it regularly and where this happens, because to me it seems such a lovely form on the ear that I’m sure it must be used regularly somewhere - up North I suspect.
Diolch pawb.
This thread was started just 3 days ago with some good stuff …
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