I don’t usually comment on internet forums (never, in fact) but having read some of the posts here on ssiw it seems like such a lovely, friendly community that I wanted to say hello. I have only been learning for about 3 weeks and have just finished challenge 14. Although by ‘finished’ I basically mean ‘listened to without saying much’ because I am finding it impossible to sort out all the ‘he said that’ and ‘my sister said that your brother…’ etc! Not to mention the ‘he wanted me to tell you’ and ‘she wanted you to tell me’. For some reason I also have a complete block when it comes to remembering ‘the old/young man/woman’!
I am an accidental Welsh learner. I have been learning french and was looking around for some intermediate french resources and I stumbled across someone talking about ssiw on a language learning site. It sounded quite interesting so for a bit of fun I listened to the first challenge and really enjoyed it so I did the next challenge and the next and here I am at challenge 14!
I had never thought about learning Welsh although I believe I had a great, great grandmother who was Welsh and actually my brother in law has just moved to Wales. I love the musicality of the language.
Anyway, thank you for such a great course and for providing so much free content which tempted me to try it. Without it I would never even have thought about starting to learn Welsh
Welcome, it’s good to have you here. This is indeed a lovely, friendly community, and everyone is so helpful and encouraging. I am an accidental Welsh learner too. I was trying a bit of Italian when I discovered Welsh instead, and I haven’t looked at Italian since. Three months later, and I am half way through Level 2, currently listening to challenge 17 without managing to say much. The old women, young men and the people who say that your sister works with their brother will all gradually become clear. A whole new set of mysterious phrases will replace them. That’s the fun.
Croeso, @Francesca13 I actually came on here hoping to relearn my Welsh as an antidote to hiraeth - a special sort of longing for Wales (I moved to Scotland for what seemed like a good reason.) The Forum is my antidote and my Welsh is still not very good! My fault - not SSiW’s!
I have surprised myself with how much am I enjoying learning with this method. I would have said that I absolutely prefer to see things written down and that I find remembering just by listening too difficult. I’m really enjoying trying something different and starting completely from scratch.
Henddraig - your forum posts persuaded me to sign the petition a couple of weeks ago I had never paid much attention to the Welsh language issues but the more time I spend on language learning the more important I think it is to preserve languages and keep resources accessible. We are spending a week in Wales in the summer and I’m hoping I will have a chance (and the confidence!) to be able to use some Welsh. As long as no one wants to tell me about what their brother said to the young woman in the pub…
Hello, hello, hello from Slovenia @Francesca13! Croeso ar y fforwm! (Welcome to the forum)!
I’m happy to hear you’re enjoying the learning method and you’ve come a long way already. I had the difficulties with “gosip” phrases too but you’ll see … when the Summer comes and you’ll be about comming to Wales you might even long for them to be used. It happens that there’s a blockade of some sort and you can’t remember or you forget some things. Mixing things is a very common thing (at least with this method) but at some point it all comes to its place and, yes as @Betterlatethan says… the new wonders and mysteries will appear.
I wish you gather that needed confidence by then to be able to speak Welsh because speaking in the wild (as we say) is priceless and gives you so much of everything: knowledge that you can actually speak, boost to your confidence to sepak more even with strangers and wish of learning more and more.
So Da iawn ti! Keep going the way you started and when there’s a stop and you have questions, don’t hesitate to come on here and put them on. Here’s always someone to help and one of the tutors (@aran and @iestyn) is always on here too and helps their own way. Even if you’re not sure that something is possible and you might be stubborn as I was, @aran will show you that this is not entirely true. Everything is possible even with such a self-beating and stubborn person as I was (umm … well … might be I still am sometimes ).
Oh and if you need some resources or you have problems and questions about “how to” on the forum, you might find this thread useful and helpful.
Now … Welcome to the forum and the community once again and keep posting.
(Oh … and how I started to learn Welsh? I was tackled by rugby and two teens pushed me into scrum with saying I will never manage to learn the language).
When the time comes, do tell us which bit you plan to visit and when - I know I speak for others too when I say we are happy to help with tips and suggestions for good places to go, and many of us are always up for meeting other learners and giving them extra opportunity to use their Welsh (and I for one have no idea what my brother says to young women in the pub! - although I may have an idea what his wife would say to him )
Diolch yn fawr!!! I have a theory that the more signatures from rest of UK, (and of the world) the more Westminster will get fed up with this vast Welsh diaspora and stump up the funds to shut us up! Mind, these things go in cycles, we have hit a very slow patch now! Oh, and with more step and ‘chosen’ relatives than born ones, I find all those sentences not just impossible to remember, but not useful enough to bother trying to remember! But some of the useful bits stick!
@tatjana thank you for all the really useful info and links and the lovely welcome @siaronjames that really made me laugh! thank you, it would be really lovely to meet up with another ssiwer. I think we will be heading to the mumbles
The Mumbles is lovely, been there a couple of times myself years ago but I’m based up North these days. There’s plenty of time to find someone down that end though:-)
I used to live on Gower. if you can, see more than Mumbles! Will you have a car? if not there used to be a bus that travelled all along,the coast.Enquiries at the main Bus Station attached to the Quadrant shopping centre should be able to help with special tourist services! Oh, warning, I gather there is a bit more Welsh spoken now, but south Gower was very monoglot English when i knew it - until 2003!
A very warm welcome to the forum, Francesca - and what a flying start you’ve had! Don’t worry about challenges 13 and 14 - they’re a bit too tough, really - it doesn’t mean that everything carries on getting more difficult…
I, too had a problem with Challenges 13 and 14, so I looked at the vocabulary on the menu button and on redoing 14 it all fell into place. Hope this helps.
This: I like books about languages, I reckon myself to be good at learning, I’ll happily sit down and read a grammar for fun – and I found the whole SSi thing to be more of a stretch than I would have expected, more rigorous than I would have thought something deliberately grammar-free would be, and more effective than anything I’ve done before
The funny thing is though, that SSiW does teach you grammar, but in more or less the same way that a child learns the “grammar” of their first language.
And those who want to can investigate the why’s and wherefores of how the grammar works later on.
To be honest, if you want to do a lot of writing in the language (or any language) then you probably do need to get a bit of formal grammar under your belt, but writing isn’t really what SSiW is all about, at least not at present.
Haha! Slovenia is a bit too far unfortunately i’m not really looking forward to the 3 and a half hours it will take us to get to Wales - I will have a 3 year old and a 15 month old !
Hello Francesca, welcome from me, too! That pretty much describes me as well – I thought I’d just try out a lesson or two, but then I just kept going and the next thing I knew, I was sitting in Aran’s living room holding a conversation with him in Welsh!
Mind, along the way there had been numerous incidents of my saying "You have got to be kidding…* when I heard a particularly long sentence as well as rude gestures towards the recordings – but in the end, it worked really surprisingly well once I learned to let go and just say the first thing that came into my mind.
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