There was a post on here a few weeks ago when someone was asking how best to start speaking Welsh with their children but I can’t seem to find it . I was having the same problem with my 9 year old daughter . She is a fluent Welsh speaker having learned it in school. When i first started trying to speak it with her she looked at me in disgust lol. She was so used to speaking to me in English and " I wasn’t saying it properly " I would urge anyone in this situation to persevere as the rewards will be great . I started off by telling her that if she speaks Welsh with me as often as she can then I will get her a treat at the end of each week ( bribery always works ) we now have half an hour each day when I pick her up from school where we are only allowed to speak Welsh with each other. You will find that speaking Welsh with your child becomes more and more natural and in fact my daughter now quite often speaks to me in Welsh without me having to ask her to. The great thing about speaking Welsh with your kids is that you can make as many mistakes as you want without being embarrassed. Such a great way to learn.
We went shopping to Bangor for the day today. I told my daughter that if she speaks Welsh with me the whole time we are there I will buy her a treat before we go home and I have to say this has turned in to probably my most successful day of speaking Welsh to date. I found that because people could hear my daughter speaking Welsh with me , not only does it pass me off as a Welsh speaker but people (ie people in the shops) were automatically speaking to us in Welsh rather than the default language of English that you usually speak to a stranger in and this opens up so many more opportunities to practice. I managed to have a couple of short conversations today where I don’t think they even caught on that I wasn’t a fluent Welsh speaker . Such a good feeling.
Anyway back to my point 
I would urge anyone in a similar situation to use your Welsh speaking children to your advantage as the rewards really are worth it and remember bribery always works 
I found the topic for you. It is here
I hope you’ll be able to find things which works for you there too.
The software is tricky sometimes and you’d have to use word “kids” instead of “children” to find the topic.
Pob lwc!
This. Basically.
Diolch Tatjana Much appreciated
Superb result! Well done you. This is exactly the kind of determination that will get you to a very, very natural level of usage - and it will give your daughter a sense of extra wealth in the language, too. 
What a brilliant story! Great tip about bribery for building habits! I used to be very cautious in the early stages as my kids hated me saying anything that didn’t sound ‘right’, but you’ve got me thinking that I might be able to get away with a bit more now… 
Diolch netmouse . It can be so awkward at first can’t it. My daughter still gives me a really stern look and corrects me when I get things wrong which I suppose is a good thing really . She used to hate me speaking it with her outside especially as she said it was embarrassing but she does seem to have mainly got over that . We still speak English with each other the vast majority of the time at the moment but speaking Welsh is definitely becoming more natural between us. Hehe and yes bribery does seem to work quite well . I can usually tell when she’s after something now though as she will start talking to me in Welsh hehe . Pob lwc 
Just keep at it. Children have a vary malleable idea of what is ‘normal’. Eventually they will regard speaking to you in Welsh as the ‘normal’ thing to do.
A couple of days ago my daughter said to me (in Welsh) “[a boy she quite likes] took my phone and was looking through it and asked ‘why do you and your dad text each other in Welsh?’ and I said we do because it’s what normal people do.”
I was very proud!
One of her friends, who has only ever heard me speak Welsh, and is admittedly not the sharpest pencil in the box, even asked her if I couldn’t speak English!
Just out of interest, @robbruce, what stage was your Welsh at when you started speaking it to your daughter regularly? What proportion of your talk was in Welsh then? What proportion is now? Do you (or did you used to) revert to English for some things? My husband tries to speak German with our kids but tends to speak English in important situations (or to tell them off…) just to make sure they’ve got the point!
I guess it becomes a lifestyle decision at some point. Our family situation is a bit complicated, and it’s arguably more important for the kids to practise German than for me to practise Welsh. It’s worth some serious thought about fitting in all three though!
I can’t really remember, to be honest. It all seems such a long time ago, but it can only be ten years, thinking about it.
I’d been learning for a couple of years but not taking it very seriously when something kind of clicked. Tegwen will have been around five, I suppose, and she had always been great with the language, going right back to her first day at Cylch Ti a Fi when she was two - she just seemed to get it that having two languages was interesting and fun.
You know how some children think that Welsh is just something that happens in school and fail to put it into a wider context? That was happening to me in a way - I couldn’t see the wider Welsh world outside of night classes and the occasional word at home. Then, from listening to Radio Cymru I think, I started to fill in the gaps that had been missing, and this is what encouraged me to start speaking a lot more Welsh at home, mainly playing role-playing games and the other silly stuff that young children love.
So we’d end up spending maybe half an hour a day playing entirely through Welsh when she was five or six. As I think I’ve said before, playing schools was (purely by fluke) the great discovery. They spoke Welsh at school so therefore we naturally played the game in Welsh at home. I still remember some of the characters we invented - Nerys the naughty girl and Nest the prim and proper good girl. Nia and Non were two others; can you see a pattern emerging?
By now, we use Welsh between us most of the time. I can’t tell her off in welsh because I can never find the words in the heat of the moment, and obviously if other family members are present and involved in the conversation, everything’s in English. Sometimes a conversation will start in English and drift into Welsh and sometimes the other way round. If we’re out of the house on our own, we generally stick to Welsh.
That’s great robbruce . I would love to be at that level of Welsh speaking with my daughter one day. Are you now a fluent Welsh speaker ?
I can relate to the role playing games, which are easy to do when they are very young. Playing shop used to be a good one, because the language was fairly simple. I spy in Welsh was also good, although I was always conscious that I might have got things wrong. Using Welsh instead of English for things like Hide and seek and ar eich marciau, insteadd of on your marks etc, plus lots of Welsh songs we could change the words to, but with made up words for things around us.
This was a lot easier at a certain age, when Cyw was the main source of media entertainment and I was in control of the iPad, but alas those days have quickly gone and I haven’t found a way to bring something new to the party – nothing that I’m capable of doing naturally anyway. If we do sometimes get going in Welsh it only takes a wrong word or two to switch a conversation back to English and those words could be something as simple as using welsh words that are not used locally or generally in Welsh, such as sglodion or sbectol haul - apparently it has to be chips and sunglasses.
We now talk almost exclusively in English, except for homework and the odd incidentalism. I would like to discover a few natural things to do in Welsh now, to recreate an environment where Welsh can be used more naturally again, but I haven’t found it yet - I know that it is my confidence and my ability that is the main problem - my confidence waned as my abilities became increasingly tested and that obviously comes across.
‘Fluent’ is one of those things that really difficult to define. It’s really tempting to see it as a moving target - “something that I haven’t quite achieved yet”.
It’s much more useful to see fluency in terms of an outwardly-moving spiral whereby you can become functionally fluent in different and gradually expanding aspects of the language. I suppose I’m what people would describe as fluent if I’m down the pub or talking to my daughter in that I don’t have to think about what I’m saying or do any internal translation. But stick me in a political meeting (especially one full of language activists) or a meeting with teachers at school and I’m a lot less confident.
Luckily, I tend to spend more time in the pub than in political meetings.
I hope you don’t mind me quoting @robbruce, but this is what you wrote in your introduction post to the SSiW forum, a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away (I wish I could get the words to scroll now!)
I’ve been learning Welsh for about five years now, though the first few
years were very hard and I didn’t really get very far. It’s easy in an
area like Radnorshire to use the excuse that there are not enough
opportunities to practice. The turning point came when two things
happened quite accidently. Firstly, I got a job that meant travelling
over the border to England every day. I felt resentful that I was having
to do this and started to listen to Radio Cymru as an antidote. Despite
not understanding 95% of what I was hearing to start with, I was
nevertheless introduced to whole swathes of Welsh culture that I was
only dimly aware of before. Can radio be an eye-opener? It was for me.
Secondly my daughter
had started school (Welsh medium - another fluke that had originated
when Cylch Ti a Fi became her favourite nursery group as a toddler) and
started to act out the events of school with some of her toys when she
got home. Of course, this game was entirely in Welsh, so I joined in,
and we were regularly spending an half hour of playing together in
Welsh.
And I love the spiral analogy - I shall be using that in my introductory spiel at bootcamp tomorrow! Diolch!