Question. There are lesson guides for (old) Course 1. Very useful indeed, but are there similar for (old) courses 2 and 3. Friends say I need to tighten up on my pronouncing and reckon one of the best ways to do this is to see how words are spelt.
If you click on FAQ, at the top of the page, and the. scroll down, you’ll see “Where can I find the lesson guides and how do I use them?”. Click on that and you will find all the guides. Here are two links to help:
Course 2 South Guide This opens the PDF guide
Course 3 South Guide This link directly downloads the PDF and then you have to open it yourself. Not sure why it’s different.
(Tagging @kinetic about the fact the the Course 3 Guide links are different than all the others)
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Got them! Very many thanks for this info. Much appreciated.
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One of the reasons we steer people away from using the content lists as much as possible is that we consistently hear better accents from people who don’t spend much time looking at the words - you can easily get tripped up by vowels that sound different in Welsh - so I’d strongly recommend you try to use the content lists just to check certain consonants (b vs p vs ff and so on), and otherwise invest your time in working through the sessions… 
Greetings Aran
and in fairness to the SSIW method which for me has been brilliant, can I explain a couple of things which in my case prompted my request re course lessons contents info. First, I’m disabled visually impaired. When I wanted to start leaning Welsh I made various night school enquiries about if possible to manage without following the textbooks, i.e. just sitting at the back and picking up what I could through hearing. All were very sympatico but felt no, the text books were key. Then one morning listening to Radio 4 Saturday Live there was this item about a group doing SSIW and how it was all audio. It felt like all my birthdays had come at once! And so, a year and a half later, C1, C2 and C3 more or less under my belt without too much wear and tear on the pause button, I feel just as excited as when I started.
But ach and bigod, whilst being age 74 is great (= lots of time) I’ve also got a hearing impairment. A recent audio review at Llandrindod showed I can have difficulty making out consonants esp at wordstarts. When I said I was learning Welsh, they wondered if I was having particular problems.At the time I felt maybe not especially. But then I was doing SSIW OK-ing before pause button - With what I thought I heard Iestyn and Cat saying.
And If I needed to jot down a whiteboard word or two for remembering, I’d write as if in English .T’'was my downfall, 'cos as mentioned my hearing ain’t too good…Esp when it came to Course 3 and I made an Englishthus-grid of all the short forms. Ach! It was about then I heard about the weekly Welsh speakers/learners group at a nearby pub.Very friendly, very supportive, and one first language speaker (wow!) wanted details of the course I was on for a friend keen to learn. But I feel have to get away fro my mis-hearings. and tighten updo need to tighten up on my speaking and get away from mis-hearings.Learning he alphabet, dirpthongs etc . And thus to the lessons notes
Sorry to have offloaded the story of my life. But if’n you’re somewhere in the middle of SSIW, for gawd’s sake, and I really mean this, don’t even think about the lesson guides/ unless you’re really desperate to be sure.
Very many thanks again to SSIW
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Fine-tuning once you’ve got through the bulk of it is a great idea, and you’re clearly ready for that…
We’d like to do more at some point in terms of highlighting key consonants that people can mis-hear - possibly with some video footage as well - but it’ll be a while before we get there…
I don’t know if @MarilynHames is still regularly comming on here. I didn’t hear from her for a while and I (to be honest) didn’t check out though, but as far as concenrs hearing imaparment, she might have some more advise for you since she’s hearing impared too.
Further on, I’m visually impared too but unfortunately I have no other advise/leading thing to tell as that which @aran or @Iestyn are saying/recommending in the lessons and off them, because I’m a bit of myself way of doing things which might not be useful or suitable for the other learners in general.
I hope Lesson guides help.
And one more thing: If you are already into Level 2 South, you might use of what’s already done with Lesson guides by @faithless78 in this topic: Course notes for Southern Level 2
Pob lwc.
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What exactly do you mean here - that the format of the URL is different, or that the visual layout of the files is different, or what?
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She means that all other links open in PDF format in browser while The Course 3 guide pops the save as window for saving file to the PC and only then you can open it. I’ve tried to see what’s happening and it does exactly this - downloads instead of instant opening.
I hope it’s understandable now. .
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Diolch, @tatjana, that’s exactly what I meant The Course 3 links start an immediate download instead of opening the PDF in the browser.
Many thanks Tatjana. Your thoughts and suggestion are much appreciated.
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I just want to say that I think this is excellent advice from @aran, and is exactly what I have been doing since I had my own rant on this forum a month or two ago about not being able to distinguish the consonants on the audio recordings.
I have a hearing impairment too. Just a mild one - if I don’t tell people, they usually don’t know - but enough to be annoying. So I do just as @aran suggested - I use the vocabulary lists as an aid to the consonants only. I skim the list before each session, making a mental note of words that are likely to trip me up, and I keep an ear out for them. After the lesson, I double-check that I’m saying the correct consonants - and then I forget about the written list entirely. I pay no attention at all to the written vowels. I just try to imitate @Iestyn and Cat’s vowels.
The downside: my Welsh literacy is almost non-existent at this stage. I wouldn’t have a clue how to spell most of what I can say. The upside: because I’m paying so much attention to listening, I think my accent is coming along OK. I guess the test of that will be when I’m finally brave enough to Skype someone and chat in Welsh. I’m still a bit shy for that, and possibly still at too early a stage. (I’m up to lesson 17 in the old course 1.)
The only remaining significant problem that my hearing disability is causing me is not being able to distinguish some words in English. For instance, if @Iestyn says at normal speed in English “I walked to the pub”, I can’t tell if he said “I walked to” or “I walk to”. The [d] on the end of “walked” gets lost in the [t] at the beginning of “to”. Similarly, I can’t tell the difference in English between “I open the door” and “I opened the door”.
In a normal conversation, you’d have some context for these sentences - e.g. “What do you do on weekends?” “I walk to the pub.” vs. “What did you do last night?” “I walked to the pub.” We hearing-impaired folk use these contextual clues to help us fill in the bits we can’t hear. But with sentences in isolation, there is no context, and I have to guess. And often, I guess wrongly. I come out with the Welsh for “I walk to”, only to discover @Iestyn said “I walked to”, or vice versa.
But it’s a problem I can live with. If I manage to say the correct Welsh for what I thought @Iestyn said, even if it’s not what he actually said, I tell myself, that’s good enough, and I move on.
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