Hello, everyone. Matilda here again. It has been a couple of weeks since I last posted, so I thought I should post an update. I’m still persevering with SSiW, and despite the obstacles, still enjoying it.
A belated thank you to everyone who has been offering advice and encouragement since I last posted. I have read all your comments and taken on board what everyone has said. I only have about half an hour a day to devote to SSiW, and because I had spent so much time in this forum saying what I was going to try, I’d spent no time at all actually trying it! I found a week or two had gone by and I hadn’t progressed an inch, and was even starting to forget some of what I’d learned so far. So I felt it was time I stopped chatting here, put my head down, and started listening to the lessons again.
I heartily agree with @Iestyn’s comments about the value of SSiW being in its emphasis on aural learning rather than visual. That was, in fact, what made the course appeal to me instantly. With most new subjects, I prefer to read. I’m a voracious reader. I’d much rather read a speech than watch a video of someone delivering the same speech or listen to a podcast, not least because I can read much, much faster than anyone can speak. But language learning is different. Most second language courses, including the ones we all did at school, start with the visual - and in my opinion, the visual can get in the way of really listening. Like all of us, I have been looking at letters of the alphabet, and combinations of letters, and pronouncing them a certain way since I was five years old, and I knew that would interfere with my ability to look at those same letters and pronounce them in the Welsh way. The only way I would be able to achieve any kind of proficiency in Welsh would be to stop reading, forget about what the words look like, and just listen. So you can understand my dismay when I discovered my hearing was no longer up to the task!
I also agree with @Iestyn that vowel sounds in a language are critical. One of the most difficult things to do when learning a second language is to forget about one’s native vowels and force one’s mouth to form the shapes of the vowels in the new language. It can be very difficult, but it’s vital if you don’t want to be tagged as a “foreign” speaker forever. I’ve occasionally been asked by actor friends whether I had any advice on how to acquire a regional accent in a hurry. My advice to them (based on experience and instinct rather than any formal research) was: if you want to fool someone into thinking you’re a native speaker, you can get away with less than perfect consonants. The native speakers who hear you will probably assume you have a speech impediment or a mild hearing disability. We’ve all met people who can’t quite pronounce [s] or [th] or [r]. It’s no big deal. But if your vowels are wrong, no one will believe you’re a native speaker, because native speakers don’t get the vowels wrong. Therefore, I concluded, if you’re trying to acquire an accent in a hurry because the opening night of your play is in two weeks, concentrate on the vowels. Get the vowels right, and if there’s any time left over, work on the consonants. It’s nice to know that my instinctive feeling that vowels are more important than consonants has been borne out for Welsh, at least!
Anyway, I thought I’d write a summary of what I’ve done, how far I’ve got, what has worked for me, and what hasn’t. It may be helpful for other beginners, especially those who also have a slight hearing problem. As always, comments welcome, especially from anyone who has faced the same struggles.
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I briefly considered learning the whole Welsh alphabet, but in the end I decided not to, for the reasons I described above. I don’t want my eyes to look at the letters that represent the vowels and tell my ears what sounds they should be hearing, especially as my native vowels are Australian-accented ones, as @Iestyn pointed out. Instead, I concentrated just on the Welsh letters that represent the six fricatives I’m having trouble distinguishing on the audio recordings: [ch], [dd], [th], [f], [ff], and [ll]; also the two approximants [r] and [rh], and also [p] when it precedes [r]. All the other sounds, I think I can distinguish without difficulty. My habit now at the beginning of each lesson is to run my eye down the vocabulary list, just looking for words and phrases which contain the problem letters - words such as ifanc or llaeth or byddi. I ignore the vowels and all the other letters, especially the bewildering-looking and seemingly unpronounceable words containing lots of [w]s and [y]s, and I focus solely on the problem letters. I make a mental note to be on the alert for these words, and then I start the recording. When a “problem” word is introduced, I stop the recording, find the word on the vocabulary list, and adjust my pronunciation of the consonants if necessary (and it usually is necessary, especially with [dd]).
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I’m aware that @aran said we shouldn’t backtrack through the lessons, but I had gone so badly wrong for four lessons, and I had such trouble getting the [fim] (with a Welsh [f]) out of my head, that I felt I needed some serious drilling of [ddim]. So I did. I went back to Lesson 1 and just treated it like a five-finger exercise on the piano: ddim, ddim, ddim, ddim. And it worked. I am now ddim-ing with the best of them. Although I still hear [fim] and I think I always will. But at least I’ve stopped saying [fim], and that’s the main thing. Occasionally my tongue trips up and says [thim] instead of [ddim], i.e. voiceless instead of voiced, but I figure that’s the lesser of two evils and people will still probably understand me even if it’s voiceless. After all, if I said to you in English “this” and “that”, but I accidentally used the same “th” sound as in “thick” and “thin”, you’d still understand me, right? Very possibly you wouldn’t even notice.
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After repeating those four lessons, I tried following @aran’s instructions to “ditch the pause button” (except to clarify a new word I was hearing for the first time, as I explained above), and “don’t repeat sessions”. I tried. I completed three whole lessons like that. And it was a spectacular failure. More than half of the time, I was saying nothing at all before Cat’s voice kicked in with the sentence in Welsh. If I was very lucky, if the sentence followed the same pattern as the preceding sentences, I’d manage to get out one or two words - the Welsh for “I am” or “you didn’t” or “I will not” or whatever (I won’t try to write these words in Welsh) - and then I’d dry up. I could not think fast enough before the recording kicked in. And if the sentence was quite different in structure from the previous one - in the past tense, say, when the previous one was the present, or future tense when the previous one was in the past tense, or a question when the previous one was a statement, or a “No” sentence when the previous one was a “Yes” sentence - I couldn’t get out a single word before Cat’s voice began. Not one word. Long compound sentences were also a problem - I couldn’t even keep the whole English sentence in my head, let alone the Welsh! @aran said to do five lessons in this manner. I didn’t get to five. I managed three (Lesson 5, Lesson 6 part 1, and Lesson 6 part 2). There didn’t seem any point continuing if I was barely able to say a word - if I’d been forced to continue, I think I would have given up the course. @aran then said to go back to the first of the lessons that had been done without pausing, and “When you go back, you’ll find it has magically become much, much easier.” So I went back to the beginning of Lesson 5. It wasn’t any easier. Most of the time, I still wasn’t able to get any of the Welsh out before Cat’s voice kicked in - and even when I managed to get a word or two out before drying up, half the time it was wrong. Sorry, @aran. Maybe I’m a spectacularly slow and stupid learner, but your method just isn’t working for me. It’s only resulting in muteness and frustration.
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So I am once again doing the lessons the same way I did when I began the course: (1) with frequent use of the pause button on all but the very shortest sentences, to give me time to think without worrying that Cat will beat me to it; (2) repeating long sentences in English, sometimes two or three or four times, to make them stick in my head before I attempt to say them in Welsh; (3) repeating each lesson as often as I need to before moving on to the next one. When I reach the point where I can get most sentences spot on and the remaining sentences mostly right, that’s the point at which I feel confident enough to move on to the next session. That usually requires playing the session three or four times.
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With the sentences I’m getting mostly right, the mistakes I’m making are small silly ones. I’m not much worried about those. I suspect they’re the same kinds of mistakes everyone makes. My most common mistakes are: (1) leaving out “can”; (2) leaving out “like” if the sentence has a long string of verbs; (3) starting a sentence with the word for “No” but then leaving out the “ddim” later on (so I end up saying “No, I want to buy it” when I should be saying “No, I don’t want to buy it”)’; (4) forgetting to switch to past tense if the previous sentences have been in present tense; (5) failing to notice that the two parts of a compound sentence are in different tenses (e.g. “I bought it because I like it”); (6) mixing up the words for “know” and “think”; (7) mixing up the words for “say” and “speak”; (8) mixing up the words for “say” and “see” (I’ve no idea why! There’s a kind of semantic logic to the previous mix-ups, but not to this one.) (9) forgetting which form of “the” to use in which context.
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The news is not all gloomy. One thing I’m pleased about is that when I do manage to get the complete Welsh sentence out, if it contains consonants that need softening, most of the time I soften them correctly. I estimate at least 80-90% of the time, I get them right, with little conscious effort, and have done from the first consonant-softening lesson. The only ones I still regularly forget are the ones following “hen” (in Lesson 6 part 1), and I occasionally trip up on the ones related to “the”. But the consonants on verbs - it’s rare that I get them wrong these days.
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Another surprising and very pleasant discovery is that I have Cat’s voice in my head saying Welsh sentences, often when I’m doing nothing in particular. It’s always Cat’s voice, never @Iestyn’s. When this began happening, I thought “They’re probably just strings of Welsh words that don’t form a real sentence”. But I translated them into English, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that they are real, meaningful sentences! (Sentences that I don’t think we’ve had in the lessons, such as the Welsh for “You bought cheese and I don’t like it.”) So somehow, Cat has taken up residence in my head, and is coming out with observations in Welsh. Obviously I’m aware that it’s my own brain conjuring up these sentences, but I’m not doing it consciously. I don’t know how this happened, but I’m quite pleased about it, because it seems that some part of my brain, even a tiny part, is starting to think in Welsh.
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I have begun listening to Radio Cymru (thanks @mikeellwood for the suggestion), sometimes concentrating on it, (although I don’t understand a word, even when concentrating!), sometimes just as background noise when I’m doing something else, just to get a feel for the intonations and rhythms of Welsh. If nothing else, it’s very relaxing! I’ve also begun to seek out YouTube clips and other videos of people speaking in Welsh. I found this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxih6CN62V0 where Rhod Gilbert recites a line of Green Eggs and Ham in Welsh, and I realised with delight that I recognised hoffi and cig. And speaking of YouTube videos: can anyone tell me what Rob Brydon says to Joanna Page at the very end of this one, and what Joanna says in reply? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY3AyfzPJ1s (at 13:22). Someone claims to give a translation in the comments, but I suspect they’re making it up.
It’s nearly 1am here, and I need to get to bed. I’m aware that some of you have asked questions above which I haven’t answered yet, but that will have to wait for another day. Good night, all.