Hi Emma, I heard Friesian is mutually intelligible with English, is this true?
Is it a big help when learning English?
I know one saying:
Bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Fries.
I am currently trying to learn Welsh, Spanish and French and find the mutual intelligibility with Italian, which I already speak, to be of huge assistance with Spanish and to some extent with French.
I’m not Emma, and I don’t speak Friesian, but I’ll add my two cents’ worth from a linguistics point of view.
Friesian is English’s closest living relative. That means the two languages split off from each other more recently than their ancestral language split off from the other Germanic languages. That close relationship is particularly noticeable in the vocabulary. You will come across a great many words in both languages that sound very similar and mean the same thing.
But “closely related” is not synonymous with “mutually intelligible”, and no, Friesian is not mutually intelligible with English.
No need to take my word for it. Test it for yourself by searching for YouTube videos in Friesian. If you are an English speaker and don’t have any knowledge of Friesian, nor any Dutch or German that might give you clues, then I challenge you to understand more than a tiny bit of Friesian without reading the subtitles. I certainly couldn’t, and I have at least a nodding acquaintance with a few Germanic languages.
Emma, probably only a native Welsh speaker could tell you whether you’re speaking Welsh with a foreign accent, and I’m not a native speaker (I’m Australian), so I couldn’t judge. But I will say this: the totally aural approach to learning in SSiW, at least in the early stages of the course, means that you have the very best shot possible at acquiring a native-like Welsh accent.
When we adult language learners read words in another language for the first time, our eyes get in the way, especially with the vowels (and what we think of as an “accent” is largely to do with how vowels are pronounced). We look at the letters that represent the vowels, and our brain tells us how those letters are pronounced in our own native language, and that interferes with what we hear. It takes a massive effort not to let it interfere, especially when we’re not even conscious that we’re doing it.
Every other language course I’ve ever done has involved reading from the very start. SSiW is different. “Get rid of your pen and paper” say @aran and @Iestyn in the introduction. That’s excellent advice. It forces us to really listen, and copy what they’re actually saying, not what we assume they’re saying.
So I can’t say whether you’ll come out of this course with an accent good enough to fool a first-language Welsh speaker, but I can say with reasonable confidence that by choosing SSiW, you’ve given yourself the best chance of it.
Thanks Mathilde.
In reference to Emma worrying about speaking with a native accent, I would pose the question as to whether it really matters.
Acquiring a native accent is not synonymous with speaking a language well. It may help, but I don’t believe it should be the goal of a language learner.
As an example, take Arsene Wenger speaking English as a case in point, his English is better than most natives but his accent is still French. Rather than detracting from the quality of his English, it adds more colour to it.
As another example, Jose Mourinho’s English is, though perhaps slightly behind Arsene Wenger’s, excellent. However, it is very easy to tell that he is Portuguese. His Italian is also exceptionally good. In fact, one of the reasons the Italian press hated him so much was because he was able to tie them up in knots as his linguistic skills were often more advanced than those writing about him. It is still, however, reasonably simple to tell he is Lusitanic.
As a teacher of languages myself, I encourage my students to concentrate on pronunciation rather than accent. I also make the point that essentially there is no such thing as a native accent. In English, someone from Liverpool does not speak in the same way as someone from Manchester. In Italian, a Milanese does not sound like a Roman. A slight use of guesswork here, but I’d wager that a Cardiffian doesn’t sound like someone from Caernarfon when speaking Welsh.
I agree with what Mathilde says regarding vowels getting in the way of native accents. That said, vowels are pronounced by different people within the same country in hundreds, maybe thousands, of different ways. I wouldn’t get lost in trying to sound native, rather I would focus on pronunciation.
Interesting - as a non-professional in languages (but as someone who has been learning them on and off for more years than I’d care to relate), I would not myself have differentiated pronunciation from accent, but now you mention it, I suppose they are different (although I would suggest related) entities.
However, while absolutely agreeing that there is no such thing as a native accent in English (RP is considered a “standard”, but it’s not really a “native accent”), I think with SSiW, you do learn an accent - Pen Llŷn (or something close to it) in the case of the northern flavour. I don’t know how to define the accent on the southern course, but it’s obviously a lot different from the northern one (not just in the small vocabulary differences). Of course, once people start speaking regularly out in the wild (as strongly encouraged by SSiW),. they will gradually adapt their accent to that of the people around them (those that live in Wales, or who otherwise have regular chance to speak Welsh with first language or very experienced speakers, anyway).
I have suffered the penalty for having a good ‘ear’. I tend to develop the accent of those around me. So., I go to France and get taken for a Belgian on the train home! Maybe a Fleming rather than a Walloon, but not a Brit! This can be very embarrassing if people think you are joking when you truly don’t understand! 
Hmmmm …
No, I won’t start to preach about my “success” but I’ll say something different for the start though:
Croeso i’r fforwm @Emma ac @aindriumacdhomhnaill. Yes @aindriumacdhomhnaill also - the latest joined (to my knowledge) member of the forum.
Now further on … @Emma I hope @elkiedeadman is still around here somewhere. She’s from Netherlands too and she’s amazing woman, speaking Cymraeg like true Cymres who I had (among all the others at the time) the honour to meet when I was on Bootcamp in July. Who knows how near/far from each-other you two really live.
I can reasure you, you’re doing just the right thig because:
About me … I wouldn’t waste too much words. But yes, I didn’t find any minute spared learning/speaking Cymraeg waste of time. It was and still is something what many times drives me to go on not just with my learning path but my life path in geheral.
I was at the bootcamp as @henddraig mentioned and I was thrilled with the whole thing. Being in position to speak the whole week only Welsh and nothing more is superb Afterwards it might very well happen that you come to London and you still start conversations in Welsh and even when you are allerted you’re in “English zone” now you just can’t stop. 
Yup, that happened to me. But, here’s my way of telling you all about it - @henddraig obviously knows me very well. You can read all about my journey to Wales, Bootcamp and accompaniant stuff here.
Don’t be too worried about the accent. Until you didn’t learn really a lot of language and really well - why not just let people know you’re learning without telling them this all the time and appologizng already in advance about your language knowledge and skills. Having your own accent in speach (as many say here) enriches the language and telling native speakers you’re (maybe) still learning at the same time not putting yourself in awkward position. Impatient people who are not willing to bare with your “not native” accent wouldn’t get into too much and too long conversation even if you’d speak like a native speaker anyway I believe. Those are usually people who actually hate to get into conversations with strangers in the first place (if the word is not about politics ).
Felly, dal ati ac paid becso! (So keep going and don’t worry!)
That is an excellent point, and one I should have addressed in my earlier post. I quite agree with you. An accent that marks a person out as a non-native speaker is not necessarily a bad thing, and in fact can be part of a person’s charm. I’d argue that the accent only becomes a problem if it prevents people from understanding them, or if for some reason they need to convince people they’re a native speaker - for example, if they’re an actor and their professional career depends on it. Anthony LaPaglia, for instance, couldn’t get work in the USA until he ditched his Australian accent entirely during auditions and fooled casting directors into thinking he was born in New York.
Years ago, when I was doing my linguistics undergraduate degree, a colleague and I were discussing accents. I was musing about one day possibly making a career as a dialect coach or speech therapist. (I never did either in the end, but that’s by the by.) My colleague’s mother tongue was Hungarian. Her English was excellent but heavily accented, the accent acquired by way of the years she had spent living in Hungary, Romania, Germany, Israel, and South Africa (and those are only the countries I can remember!), during which time she had learned Romanian, German, Hebrew, etc., and had become fluent in all those languages. She had a real knack for learning languages. But her English was heavily overlaid with a variety of influencing accents, and, I venture to say, probably her other languages were too.
She asked me whether it was possible to get rid of her “foreign” accent and sound more Australian. My response then was the same as it is now: “Well, maybe, but why would you want to? You speak excellent English. We understand you perfectly. Sure, you have an accent, but there’s nothing bad about that. Your accent is part of what makes you unique.”
They are indeed related, with quite a bit of overlap. Unless you’re a linguist, language teacher, etc., it doesn’t much matter whether you use the two terms synonymously, The average person probably wouldn’t.
If you’re really interested in trying to tease apart the differences, this page has some reasonable attempts at it: https://www.quora.com/How-is-pronunciation-different-from-accent not all of which I agree with, and at least one of which muddies the waters a bit by confusing accent-as-pronunciation-variant with accent-as-emphasis.
If you think “pronunciation” and “accent” are difficult to define in linguistic terms, try “word”. Or “sentence”. Or “syllable”, the hardest of all in my opinion. A syllable is something that everyone recognises when they hear it - e.g. you instantly know whether a word has two syllables or three - but it’s fiendishly difficult to actually define.
Hi emma,
I am so happy to have caught up with this thread as I live in Zaltbommel and have been looking for other welsh language learners in NL since I started learning welsh a couple of years ago.
If you are interested in contacting me, please let me know and we can phone eachother. I am often in Zwolle which is a little closer to Friesland than Zaltbommel …so maybe we could meet up some time there for a ‘paned’ ( cuppa) ?
Warm wishes,
Elkie
YAY! I knew I have to give you a note in a way! Da iawn! Dw i’n hapus iawn!
Though it can be tricky even without resorting to Salish languages or Georgian, just using English – how many syllables are “fire” or “power”, one or two?
Wow, thank you so much everyone for your warm welcomes. I timed that first post ill, didn’t have much time to answer, so I’ll just make one big post of it.
Fascinating to see how the conversation has flown towards discussion of accents and pronunciation in general. Just to make it clear, I have no ambition at all to pass for Welsh. It was the Frisians I met (not a few!) who had the attitude of ‘If you’re no native speaker I don’t care to speak the language with you’, and who made me worry this might be the same in Wales. Very glad to read that this doesn’t seem to be the case. Frisian and Dutch are quite alike, and the former is being strongly influenced by the latter. I imagine the strong nationalists feared my importing too many ‘Dutchisms’ into the language - it was always in the proudest and fiercest area where I got these odd reactions.
@louis, wêr hie dat no tocht, who’d have thought, to find a fellow speaker of Frisian on a Welsh forum. Goeie!/Hi! Do you have any connection with the area, to have been learning it, or was it just out of interest? Frisian on Futurelearn?? That’s great!
Good to hear you got some good practise when you were visiting. I’ll keep that in mind. Maybe make a button, or a hat&jacket saying ‘I would love to speak Welsh with you, even if you mangle it as badly as I do’.
@henddraig (is that Welsh for Henry?), I’d already signed that, very important to keep that channel alive.
@mikeellwood, did you enjoy your holiday in Ostfriesland? Seems like a terribly windy area to go cycling - but that might be part of the attration? Having Germans take you for Dutch must mean your knowledge of the language may not have been as imperfect, well done. They’re quite alike, it’s relatively easy for us.
Moyn sounds like Frisian as well - I know they write it Moarn here, but I imagine it must more or less sound the same. Generally there’s little difference in speech in the border areas - my relatives on the Dutch side of the border can speak in dialect with people from the other side very easily, but need lessons to read their texts.
@aindriumacdhomhnaill, I refer to Matilda’s excellent post for the answer to your question as to mutual intelligibility (???). They are the closest relatives, but Frisian has remained Germanic while English had a lot of Norman input, of course. But yes, here, your saying would be ‘Butter, brea en griine tsiis is goed ingelsk en goed frysk.’ I’m used to a different second sentence though, meaning ‘Butter, bread and green cheese, whoever can’t say that (properly) is no real Frisian.’ They do sound a bit obsessed with ‘proper Frisianness’, come to think of it. 
Thanks to everyone who suggested bootcamp, that looks absolutely brilliant. Great excuse for a visit… 
Yes, @aran, there are so many ways to practise now, it definitely makes language learning abroad quite a bit easier. I just started challenge 5, so will start looking for someone to practise with soon. It’s going well!
Thanks everyone for the encouragement, you’ve given a boost to my already great enthusiasm.
Yes indeed, Philip. Just when you reckon you’ve got a good working definition of what a syllable is, along come diphthongs and triphthongs to make you tear your hair out and start again.
Personally, my answer to “fire” and “power” would be “it depends”. It depends how much palatalisation the speaker gives to the word “fire”, and how much labialisation they give to the word “power”. Which effectively means you need a speaker. My “it depends” answer means a word can’t be said to have any definite number of syllables at all, independent of someone to say that word.
But that’s just an opinion, and you’ll find plenty of disagreement.
Hen Ddraig = Old Dragon.
The Welsh equivalent of Henry, I think, would be Harri.
As in:
It means ‘old dragon’ - ‘hen’ = old, ‘draig’ = dragon. I am actually an old dragoness, but the ‘dd’ (softer than ‘d’) is something that happens after ‘hen’, not to show I’m female!
Diolch yn fawr (thank you very much) for signing. I am very distrustful of the UK Government. There is a tendency to try to use S4C as a bargaining chip just before elections and reverse all promises afterwards!
Oh, I see others have explained my name before me, never mind. I am not actually the oldest on the forum, One chap is 82 and I’m only 75.
I am sure you will progress fine with your Cymraeg and be very welcome when you visit. As I am in Yr Alban (Scotland), I’ll not see you, but you will feel a lot of warmth from those who do!
Wow, Elkie, that’s great news, I’d love to get in touch and have a paned and a chat or two. I realized when I read your note that I got the subject wrong - I’m near Alkmaar (in West-Friesland, so technically not very wrong ), so perhaps Utrecht might be more on the way? We’ll figure out something, I’m sure. I’ll PM you my phone number - I’m very busy until Sinterklaas but would love to talk to you after the 5th.
No connection, but I had been thinking for a long time that I should really know the second official language of the Netherlands, so when a friend pointed out the Futurelearn course, I went for it. I find it much harder than I thought, partly because of the course’s methods, but also, strangely, because Frisian is both similar and dissimilar enough to Dutch for me to get confused.
I am sure Aran wouldn’t mind if someone were to create a SizzeWatynitFrysk course…
This has been exactly my experience when, with a prior knowledge of Afrikaans, I’ve tried to learn Dutch! To paraphrase: Dutch is both similar and dissimilar enough to Afrikaans for me to get confused. Ek vind dit 'n bietjie moeilik (“I find it a bit difficult” - Afr).
BTW Louis, I understood two words in Frisian in your post - “swak” and “bytsje” - so it seems these two words are interchangeable between Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans.
I don’t know “swak” (apart from guessing from the context), but I’m guessing that “bytsje” might be cognate with German “bisschen” and English “bit”.
I could plug them into a translation tool, but where’s the fun in that.