Maybe it sounds a bit obvious this would be the case, but does anyone else struggle with learning new stuff as confidently as old stuff? Ie, Welsh words and phrases that I learnt back in primary/secondary school/during my GCSEs I don’t even need to bother mentally translating to English to understand – they feel more an extension to English; however since I’ve started trying to learn Welsh again for the last year or so, whilst I can happily translate stuff if I need to, and practically have a more useful ability with the language that during school, none of the new stuff I’ve learnt since then have really gone into that “don’t-have-to-translate-box”.
If so, does anyone have any tips for getting to that point where you no longer have to mentally translate stuff anymore? It really does make trying to watch S4C, or listen to Radio Cymru an awful lot harder when you both have to parse and translate their language, rather than just the former!
This is a fairly common experience, and not one to worry about too much - it’s entirely natural that language which has been a part of you for a long time would operate more smoothly than language you’ve only recently acquired.
The ‘mental translation’ thing - I’m not aware of any approaches that specifically change that sensation - it’s just a process, the more you listen to the language, the less you’ll find you need to think about it, until one day you realise you’re not consciously ‘translating’ any more…
Sorry to be a pain, but I have a few more questions!
In the phrase am biti mis, which seems to come up quite often, what does biti mean? Haven’t been able to find it in my dictionary, so I was wondering if it’s some kind of shortened word or something?
Other question is when past tense verbs come up. I’m on about challenge 10 (Southern Level 1), right now, and sentences seem to use a mixture of short and long form verbs. Is that to give us practice with both, or just using whichever one is most popular in spoken Welsh?
Cheers in advance, and thanks for this great course!
I am now realising that I just sort of accepted am biti or am buti. Thinking about it, I’d have said. ‘for about a month’ would be ‘am tua mis’. @aran, dear, could you tell us why it isn’t?
‘am’ can be ‘for’ or ‘about’ and ‘am am’ would be odd, so ‘am tua’ seems better, yes/no?
Helo
Aran, I can remember you mentioning something about a 4K vocab task which would be around by this time. Are you able to give an update about this?
Also I was wondering if anyone knows, apart from those on the BBC radio cymru website, of any Welsh podcasts, whether its a series or one offs. I havent seen any on Golwg 360. What about ITunes or youtube? Anybody know of any good podcasts videos in Welsh
I’m not sure about podcasts as such, but it’s worth browsing on Soundcloud … e.g. searching on “Welsh” or “Cymraeg” or similar. There is definitely Welsh stuff on there, of varying sorts.
which sounds like dwy vil, so not much different from Cornish.
1000 is mil which soft mutates because year is female and dwy not dau for the same reason.
I am going to be a nuisance again and ask, if not too busy, @garethrking Is that right?
Ahem - yes, I was hoping to be further down that route than I am by now - broadly speaking, the production/recording work for Level 3 has turned out to take a lot more time and effort than I’d predicted.
Having said that - it’s only Catrin’s cold that has stopped us getting the first couple of Level 3 lessons out this week, which means we’ll be starting to publish consistently in the new year, which also means that it will probably be in January that we can start some of the elements of the 4k build…
