I love speaking Welsh to Eirwen in Italy and in France for that very reason. The clandestine nature of it adds an extra thrill!!
Justin
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I like Colloquial Welsh very much, the mutations are marked excellently, the differences between the spoken and the written language are explained, and it is, as you said, very useful for accumulating vocabulary:) I also have “Welsh in three months” (despite its not very serious name it’s a very good book I think) and “Teach yourself Welsh” which I use mainly as listening and reading exercises. I’d also love to find a book with just a lot of exercises, because I just can’t manage to remember the personal pronouns and mutations, but I still haven’t found anything like this.
Oh yes, that would be excellent!
I love it when people try to guess which language I’m speaking!
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I understand completely - I was intrigued by a couple in France recently who I discovered on asking were speaking Czech.
And again in Wales I couldn’t figure out at first that a couple were speaking Turkish.
I love sitting on the Metro in Paris and trying to tune into five different conversations at once to see if I can cope with so many languages in play at the same time.
Justin
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My step-father had a little Gaidhlig from his childhood - which has similarly challenging spelling! He used to like to say that it was important to have a lot of spare letters in case any of them got lost or broken…
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I have a friend who used to talk about the French language in a similar vein. He said French pronunciation was based on the “principle of vowel exclusion” - you look to see which vowel is NOT in the word, and pronounce it that way. For an example he used the word eau which is pronounced “oh”
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It’s not too far away… 
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She did.
Here:
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Absolutely fantastic - do you think that a small investment in ‘‘Colloquial Welsh’’ is worth it in the meantime or do you recommend any other source for accumulating vocabulary systematically in the interim. Bearing in mind that SSiW is always better and worth waiting for - of course
Justin
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Gareth King to the rescue again, I think:
“Basic Welsh: A Grammar and workbook”
“Intermediate Welsh: A grammar and workbook”.
They have exercises with keys, and don’t be put off by the adjective “basic”.
They are a good fit with SSiW in my opinion.
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Well, I bought copies of “Colloquial” (old and new versions) cheap on Amazon.co.uk marketplace, so for me, it was a low-risk investment (and having old and new satisfied the “complete-ist” aspect of my character. What I like about this way of picking up vocabulary is that you see it used in context.
And his “Welsh Reader” is very good for that as well, plus some very useful explanatory notes.
I guess I have the complete Gareth King Welsh “canon” by now, and, since I can’t get to Welsh classes in any case, this is a relatively cheap and leisurely (since I can read and dip into them at my own very leisurely pace") way of filling in gaps in my grammar and another way of picking up vocabulary in context. As you are in mainland Europe, I’m not sure whether the postage costs from the UK would make them such a bargain for you, but it’s worth considering. (The “Welsh Reader” is not all that cheap, but once I’d got it, I decided it was very good value for money).
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Diolch yn fawr, that will be perfect:) I’m a secret fan of grammar drills and I always suffer from lack of exercises in Welsh textbooks.
Gareth King is always good, other alternatives-
Heini Gruffudd’s Welsh Excercises
I found useful in that sort of way
(Going along with his Welsh Rules book
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Welsh-Rules-Grammar-Learners-x/dp/0862436567)
But they both stand alone.
Always good to use lots of different sources for the increase of vocabulary and the different ways of using that vocabulary of course!
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Oh, thanks a lot! 2000 exercises - that seems to be exactly the thing I’m looking for!
That’s a great help. I’ll check what’s available on Kindle though I’m a die-hard real book fan. My next U.K. visitor will be tasked to bring me ‘‘Colloquial Welsh’’ plus ‘‘Welsh Reader’’.
I have been trying to stick to recorded dialogues plus talking to Eirwen. However, I’m very bad at keeping a note-book for new vocabulary as I come across it, speaking to Eirwen. I need something systematic and disciplined. The dialogues did that for me. So now its ''a book, a book, my kingdom for a book …"
Justin
I’m a huge fan of ‘Colloquial Welsh’ - it’s head and shoulders the best of the Colloquial series that I’ve used.
For purely vocab addition, albeit in a ‘one trick pony’ kind of approach, I’ve always thought it might be interesting to see how one of our advanced learners got on with this (not very cheap) approach: http://www.200words-a-day.com/learn-welsh.html - although I must stress that I haven’t used any of their materials myself.
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I’ve got the whole Gareth King series- like everyone else I know who tries them, I would recommend them to everyone (and this from someone where one per cent of the writing made me want to throw the books out of the window! 
But even when I was for a short time almost unable to read them myself, I always recommended them to everyone else wholeheartedly!)
Apart from- and this is my opinion and quite possibly a very minor one- apart from the Reader.
I would rather spend thirty pounds on a selection of various books.
It does, however, depend on a lot of things- when I look at thirty pounds, I see at least fifteen good quality second hand Welsh books, in a selection of styles. Many people aren’t in that position.
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Not an advanced learner, but I used to just spend quite a bit of time just looking up words In the dictionary- I was just interested to know what words in subjects I was interested in were in Welsh.
I found I was interested in doing that, and could spend a bit of spare time doing it, but that may well be only for a minority! Possibly the most straightforward and simplest (and cheapest!) way of doing it if you can, though.
I found that as I was interested in the subject, and interested in knowing what the words were, they tended to stick.
Maybe just me!
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Well, I must admit, I hesitated a very long time before buying the Reader.
When I finally got around to it, I was rather glad I had, but I think it was a question of readiness for that particular book at that particular time. It might not suit everyone, and it might not have suited me earlier, but this was not a scientific decision, but a sort of organic one. (If anyone wants to put that into Pseud’s Corner, be my guest. 
).
Absolutely, and I have done that myself.
If anyone knows about the How-To-Learn-Any-Language forum, one of the very respected posters and polyglots on that site, Iversen, uses this method to pick up vocabulary (in the many languages he studies). He then puts it into his own paper-based vocabulary learning system, which he has described in great detail on that site. I haven’t looked at the site for a while (partly because the software there is creaking and it runs very slowly…or it did last time I tried it), but if one can live with that, it’s a very interesting forum … for language nerds. 
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Good - I need that. My own paper-based system is not working terribly well. I love the systematic discipline of the SSiW dialogues. I must be like a patient needing to be weaned away from their therapist and stand on their own two feet.
The ‘‘show me the easy way’’ part of me still yearns for the extra dialogues that would double our vocabulary and leave us a huge further step inro mastering Welsh before being let loose in the wide world - - left only with our wits and the SSiW Forum of course
Justin
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Justin,
Here is one thread in that forum about the method. It’s not Iversen’s own thread, but he does contribute. Somewhere there is is own complete system for learning languages, and the his “wordlist” system is part of that.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=10325&PN=1&TPN=2
His “wordlist” system is extremely simple in principle (although it probably incorporates some deeper logical principles within it), and I would say “it works”…if you are prepared to put the work in to make it work. That’s the hard bit. I have used it, and might use it again, but it’s not something I’m currently doing.
(I notice HTLAL was responding more quickly than it used to when I visited it regularly. Hopefully, that’s a permanent improvement and not just a lucky day).
…
OK, I have now found his complete guide to learning languages. This is the first part of a (currently) 5 part series. There are links to the other parts at the end of that part (and every part contains those links).
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=16932&PN=1
As I say, that guide is more than just the wordlist method, although that is a very important part of his method. It’s quite different to SSi of course.
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BTW, for reasons too complicated to explain in a short post, the majority of HTLAL regulars have partly or wholly jumped ship this summer to start posting additionally or exclusively at http://forum.language-learners.org/. I had a log for a decent while at the original HTLAL, but I haven’t posted (in my log) for a long time. My username is “geoffw” at both sites.
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