I first encountered SSiW approximately a year ago, and have been dipping in and out of it (the southern Welsh lessons, with Iestyn and Cat) since then.
I have occasional short bursts where I do lessons for several days running, then life gets in the way and I don’t do a lesson for weeks on end - although I do make the effort to revise what I’ve learned so far, having conversations with myself in my head. I often do this in bed late at night if I can’t sleep.
So far, coming and going like this, I’ve got up to lesson 18 in level 1 of what I think is the “old” course. And that leads me to the first point I want to make. I don’t know for certain whether I’m doing the old course or the new course. I don’t know how they’re different. I don’t know why or when they became different. I only know when reading the forum, people often refer to the old courses and the new levels, or the old levels and the new challenges, or heaven knows what, and I have no idea what they’re talking about.
I gather they mean some or all of the lessons were revised, with new recordings and/or new vocabulary lists, or whatever. But I’m only guessing. All I can say is, I’m doing whatever South Welsh lessons were on the website just over a year ago, because that’s when I first encountered SSiW and downloaded them.
I’m sure somewhere or other in this forum, or in the FAQ, is a straightforward, concise explanation of the overall structure of SSiW, what it consists of, why it used to have courses and now has levels or vice versa and where these things called challenges fit in, and whatever else a newcomer needs to know. I have gone looking for such an explanation, but I haven’t found it, and sorry, I can’t spare the time to look further, because this forum is truly vast in size and very daunting for a newcomer. It does make up for its daunting size in warmth and friendliness! But I hate asking questions that have already been asked and answered time and time again, which is why I haven’t mentioned this until now. I’ve been trying to find the answer on my own, with no luck.
Anyway. I am pleased to read that @aran is writing a User Guide. I think SSiW has been crying out for one for quite a while, to help ease the newcomer into it.
To answer your specific questions:
Not using the pause button: I gave that my very, very best shot, but it just did not work for me. I stuck it out for three whole lessons, during which I said almost nothing at all before Cat’s voice kicked in, and worse, by the end of the third non-pausing lesson, I was at the point where I wouldn’t even have known what to say any more even if I’d had plenty of time to say it. The new information was now coming too fast for me to take it in. My Welsh had barely improved by a syllable for three lessons, and the only thing not-pausing was doing was making me cross and feel like chucking it in. More details in this post. So I decided to ignore the don’t-pause instruction. I backtracked three lessons, paused as much as I wanted, and made a whole lot more progress. I felt considerably better when @aran explained that it was probably my well-below-average working memory that was to blame. Not pausing is probably a perfectly fine and even desirable approach for most people. I don’t want to discourage people from giving it a try. It just didn’t work for me.
Not repeating lessons: I did try that too, but discovered it just didn’t work for me, for much the same reason as not pausing didn’t work. So now, I repeat lessons if I didn’t quite grasp an explanation the first time, or if I’ve forgotten a word, or even if I just feel like it. I don’t get bored repeating lessons; on the contrary, I feel quite triumphant after playing the same lesson three or four times and realising just how much more I can get right now than the first time I did that lesson.
Do the listening exercises. I’m not even sure what that means. Is it something to do with the new course? Or is it something I will encounter further along than the stage I’ve got to at the moment?
Get a conversation partner. I probably should. But I’m feeling shy. I tend to completely dry up under pressure and it would be very embarrassing to be on the end of a Skype conversation with literally nothing to say, or not understanding what is said to me.
Put off reading. Now this, in my opinion, is SSiW’s greatest strength - the fact that it doesn’t require you to read, at least in the early stages. I love this. I LOVE it. And why I love it is best illustrated by comparing it to Duolingo.
Alongside SSiW, I’ve also been dipping in and out of Duolingo (out of curiosity - I heard of it via an online friend learning Swedish) - and I have to say, if I were only using Duolingo, I’d be making very little real progress. Sure, I’d be ticking off the Duolingo lessons completed, but as for real conversational progress in Welsh - nope. Not happening. SsiW suits me far better.
Duolingo does have audio, but (in Welsh, anyway) it’s a robot voice rather than a real one, and, primarily, Duolingo is a visual medium. It requires you to read, and to spell. There’s no getting round it. It is tolerant of the occasional typo, but nothing more than that. If you spell a word wrongly, then bzzzzzt, you got it wrong, no matter how good your pronunciation may be.
Now, I’m a very good speller in English, but a shockingly bad speller in Welsh. When I look at words in Welsh, my eyes just glaze over, and as soon as I look away, I’ve forgotten what letters they contained, let alone what order they should be in. I often know how to pronounce words in Welsh, but not how to spell them. I type in my best attempt, but it’s wrong. I got the y and w around the wrong way, or I typed i instead of u, or yr instead of 'r, or r instead of rh, or whatever. Duolingo doesn’t care that I can pronounce it just fine. You got it WRONG! Spell it again, and keep spelling until you get it right. I find this tedious. I don’t care that I’m a poor speller in Welsh. I don’t need to read and write Welsh - not at this stage anyway. I want to speak it and to understand it when I hear it. Duolingo doesn’t care what my priorities are.
In contrast, SSiW is a totally aural approach, and I love it. The only reading I ever do in SSiW is confirming that I haven’t misheard consonants because of my slight hearing disability. Everything else is aural, and for me, that is how I learn best. And it’s a real voice - two real voices, even! - which tend to stick in my mind, not a stilted artificial voice.
What’s more, in SSiW the same words are repeated over and over again in countless different combinations - and that reinforcement is exactly what I need. Duolingo introduces new vocabulary at a faster rate than SSiW - but with minimal repetition (almost non-existent repetition for some words!), I find I’m forgetting Duolingo’s new words as fast as they’re introduced. They are almost literally going in one ear and out the other. In contrast, SSiW introduces new words more gradually, but I’m much more likely to retain them into the next lesson and beyond. So what seems to be slower progress in SSiW actually works out faster in the long run.
Accept all the different ways of saying the same thing. So far, not a big problem, although that could be because I haven’t yet been exposed many instances of it. I have, though, encountered one significant contradiction - I’ve been saying a certain phrase the SSiW way (or what I thought was the SSiW way), but a Welsh speaker on Duolingo’s discussion board said no, that’s just wrong. Hmmm. Puzzling. I might post about that in a different thread. But other than that, no problem so far.
Avoid worrying about grammar. This is another thing I really love about SSiW. Grammatical explanations are kept to a minimum. They’re not (and can’t be) zero, but they are drip-fed to us on a need-to-know basis. In other words, we are given just enough grammatical explanation to understand what we’re hearing and to understand how to use this particular construction. It’s probably an incomplete explanation, but that’s OK - we don’t need to know all the rest just yet. In a later lesson, that grammatical explanation is refined or expanded on. Later still, it’s refined or expanded on still further.
This drip-feeding approach to grammar is just fine with me. It sure beats the language teacher standing at the front of the class droning on about how today we’re going to be doing the pluperfect passive subjunctive, and here are the 46 different variations of it. (I like grammar, and even I find that sort of thing tedious!)
Avoid worrying about plateaus. I haven’t worried so far, but I think that’s partly because my plateaus have been self-inflicted, to a large degree - the result of my taking long breaks from lessons - and partly because I repeat lessons until I feel confident with the material. If I were actively doing SSiW lessons but forgetting things as fast as I learned them, as with Duolingo, I’d be a lot more concerned.
Getting used to saying R. I’ve never been the world’s greatest R-roller, but I get by. Don’t ask me to say rrrrrrrrr, but I can say R in words like prynu or rhoi without embarrassing myself too much, I think.
Getting used to saying Ll; Getting used to saying Ch Both very easy, but I have a degree in linguistics. I learned to say [ll] (a lateral fricative) in phonetics class, and as for [ch], I did German in school. Never had the slightest trouble saying either of them. (Hearing them is another thing altogether, because of my slight hearing disability, but that’s not an insurmountable problem. I just check each word in writing when it’s first introduced, to see whether the fricative is [ll] or [ch] or [dd] or [f] or [v] or whatever. As long as I know which one it’s meant to be, I can pronounce it just fine.)
That’s about all I can think of to say. Not sure if any of this is useful to you, @aran, but you can use whatever you like.
Just last week I finished the final lesson, now I’ve moved on to the new challenges (still southern) and am up to challenge 8.