Ah cool, sounds fantastic then! Especially if you have a small pool of people to get started with
I also like the pricing structure youâre suggesting. Nice and simple. I was imagining all kinds of âpay x for this content, pay y for premium contentâ etc etc. Keeping it simple should encourage takeup.
Yup, I think we start by jury-rigging it within the existing site - and then put any increase in cashflow into more prizes and more site development, with a medium term aim to make it as slick and pretty as possibleâŚ
I like your ideas. The internet is this huge source of content in a target language for almost anyone, and Iâve found that no language learner whoâs online will use it without independently looking for a lot of accessible story, news, and other media. A media company for language learners will always do well.
I would go one futher and encourage you to also produce more materials for learners at the lower levels, because there is no âtoo muchâ in terms of what will make someoneâs ears perk up and suddenly get really into the language. Iâm on Level 2 Challenge 7 (newydd orffen ) and I still donât understand fast talk on the Pigion podcast which is for ârhai syân dysgu Cymraegâ.
In Spanish youâre always going to face a more crowded market (plus MFL teachers and the school system and its scars on everyone), so I wonder if another target language may be interesting here - something quirky yet popular like Thai? Just bouncing an idea around now.
And please, Aran and IestynâŚlet me work on Say Something in German with you soon
I subscribe to a podcast called âNews in Slow Frenchâ, which is basically a couple of times a week 5-6 minute blog that gives you some of the headlines of events that have happened in France as of late - recorded in pretty slow French. (Even as a fluent French speaker I struggle with news broadcasts as the newsreaders just go at concord speed that would make even the quickest Welsh speaker look like a Donkey on the beach).
How about that for a suggestion? âNews in Learnerâs Welshâ, quick, sharp news articles in terms weâll have already learned from SSIW itself.
(edit: got the name of the podcast the wrong way around)
Question: have you been using the accelerated listening exercises in Level 1?
And yes, as soon as the SSiBorg is ready weâll be looking to widen up, and weâd love to have you involved with the GermanâŚ
Yes, interesting thought - I donât like the âslowed downâ approach, because I think that trains you not to understand normal speed - but I do like the idea of taking news pieces, transcribing/translating them, and then getting you to listen to the known material at double speedâŚ
Hereâs something Iâve been thinking about for some time: People who have finished the courses (people like you, Nicky) need some encouragement to stop being âlearnersâ and start being âsecond language speakersâ. This doesnât mean doing anything different, really, just adopting a slightly different attitude. So when you inevitably paint yourself into a grammatical corner during a particularly complex sentence, you donât say âsorry, Iâm a learnerâ, but âsorry, itâs not my first languageâ (if, indeed, you feel you need to explain anything!).
Iâve said this before on this forum, but people from say Poland or Bulgaria who are learning English stop being called learners once they have grasped basic grammar and have acquired a vocabulary of a few hundred essential words. These very same people learning Welsh will probably always be âlearnersâ, even if their Welsh becomes better than their English!
So, where Iâm going here is for and âadded directionâ for SSIW to include promotion of this change in attitude, both amongst first and second language speakers: âCroeso, a dyma newyddion yr wythnos ar gyfer siaradwyr ail iaithâŚâ
As a fellow listener of ânews in slow Frenchâ, iâd say itâs a bit like Pigion: presenters who speak rather slowly and carefully - not slowed down audio. so theres thatâŚ?
Can I ask what is the plan for the lessons anyway?
Because the old material had 3 levels, the naive like me would probably be assuming that there are going to be 3 levels in the new course - or are there going to be more?
Or is SSIBorg going to come along and kill the whole concept of levels?
Though the presenter talks a little more slowly, the people talking on the Pigion podcast clips are speaking at normal speed. But itâs easier to understand because theyâre speaking quite clearly about a straightforward but interesting topic and without intrusive background noise. Also the clips are short. I lose concentration and my mind tends to drift off if someone is talking continuously for a long period.
Thatâs the thing, and I think a lot of that comes down to the person and their confidence.
To be honest, Iâve been really living the language since moving to Mid-Wales - last night we down the local Welsh pub, perched up on a stool at the bar and spent 4/5 hours chatting away in proper Welsh with proper Welsh speakers about proper subjects of the day: buying houses, renting them out to students, football, politics, Brexit and things like that.
I do this on a regular basis and never need to fall back to English, and my use of English is now down to the rare âdictionary termâ (âdecentralization of the populationâ was a phrase I used last night!) - and I know people argue until they are blue in the face over this, but Iâm more than happy to say that I am a fluent Welsh speaker now.
I donât know every single word (but then no-one does, even native speakers), but I can live, thrive and survive in the language, so screw it - yep, Iâm claiming the fluency belt!!!
Having said that then, my wife for example is a lot less confident than me and still likes to wear her learner badge when sheâs out and about for example and even though she has about the same level of the language as me, sheâs a lot shy-er about it.
I think itâs a question of confidence - if I was speaking Welsh and made a mistake I would just cough, restart and carry on, whereas a few people I know would be absolutely mortified.
Youâre very right in what you say. If you think of people youâve been served by in shops, or met - people who are second language English, but you rarely if ever hear them saying âIâm still learningâ, they just jump into it.
I think I got the title of the potential podcast wrong :D:D but I think what I was aiming for, was that some like our good Aran or our good Iestyn would maybe pick up a Welsh newspaper, or Golwg - or anything - pick some articles and maybe turn them into audio stories, using the Welsh that we already know from the course.
I do know however, that our @aran is a sicko who, instead of playing it at normal speed would turn it into âSonic the Hedgehog speed News in Welshâ or something equally as challenging
Sounds like a model that could work. I can see it could expand the audience for SSiW (and potentially other small languages) to carve a niche in the market of encouraging content for learners, as well as providing a small paid market for first language artists, both of which are good.
Would it be feasible to produce the content, whether itâs conversation, poem, short story, and then instead of translation/transcription which can be pretty time-consuming, record the vocab that is new into the SSiW format and tick the relevant bits off the âfirst 4000 wordsâ list? Kind of using the additional content as the skeleton for the next installment? I donât know enough about how your back end stuff works to know if this is doable.
Iâm in the same position as you, henddraig (always enjoy your posts); apart from being No Longer Young I live in Germany and am therefore unlikely to come across many Cymraeg speakers on a daily basis. Iâve finished all the available courses and levels, found the course the best language course Iâve ever done, but am now casting about for suitable resources to help me go on from there and would jump at the chance of finding them on SSIW, to which I feel a great deal of loyalty and affection.
What would help me personally would be transcriptions of radio programme excerpts (they neednât be long). My ears just arenât good enough to pick up enough individual words to be able to look them up in the dictionary, which is discouraging.
I listen to Pigion but have to be honest - I can understand the introduction to each topic reasonably well but canât usually follow the original interviews, conversations etc., especially as there is a distressing (for learners) habit of using recordings of telephone conversations - the sound quality makes it doubly difficult to follow whatâs being said.
As suggested by others, audiobooks to accompany printed editions would be excellent too.
What I would REALLY like would be for S4C to have subtitles in Welsh, not English. So any form of collaboration with them would be fantastic.
Anyway, the idea of branching out is exciting and I will be up there supporting it!
Agree with this - although Iâm not immediately sure how best to go about it - Iâm fairly wary of âsiaradwyr ail iaithâ, too, which I think is often just a âtrying to be niceâ way of saying LEARNER. I think it might be interesting to do some group thinking around thisâŚ
So how quickly did you give up on them? I ask because they really, really make a difference - Iâve watched them trigger clear neurological change in less than 5 days, over and over againâŚ
Weâve really, really got to up our game on making it clearer whatâs available where! Every 5 lessons, on the lesson download page - so Challenge 5, 10, 15 etc - scroll down under the lesson download, and youâll find the listening exerciseâŚ
Good heavens, no, didnât think you were being negative at all - just giving valuable feedback, as ever!
Oh, thatâs a nice small questionâŚ
As things stand, we seem almost certainly to have âtoo muchâ material for Level 3, but probably not enough for a whole Level 4 - so Iâm currently thinking in terms of getting to the end of Level 3, and then adding a few more as a kind of Level 3+.
Once those are done, weâll be focusing on vocabulary building, which I think needs to be done in a story format, rather than a âcomplete SSiW lesson for each 10 new wordsâ - although as per @alice9âs idea, we may well find that some of the content triggers a set of vocab that seems widespread enough for it to be worth lessonificationâŚ
Then whatâs coming down the line - once the SSiBorg is behaving itself in terms of building new languages, then our next major challenge is to turn it into an online streaming kind of thing - so yes, at that point, instead of having âchallengesâ or âlessonsâ, youâll just log in and hit play (weâll need to have some kind of deal for people who want to learn offline - maybe make it possible to download chunks of x minutes a go) - and that will start to help us know how much time youâve put in, and to measure whatâs sticking and whatâs not, and start to make it adaptive⌠but weâll probably need to crack some other languages before we have the cash-flow for the team weâre going to need for thatâŚ
Thatâs a really interesting idea - youâre spot on about translation/transcription as the real time-eater here, which of course knocks on into costs⌠having said that, even with the SSiBorg, lesson production is a fair bit of work too, and tougher (at this stage) to outsource⌠but youâve given me something good to chew over here - diolch!
Thank you so much for your enthusiasm, support and ideas, Janet! Yes, collaboration would be terrific, if we can get to that point - weâll probably need to show that we can build a large enough audience first, but if we can crack that, we should be able to find good ways to collaborate, and weâll certainly be looking to do soâŚ
Thank you all so much for your feedback in here.
Itâs been thought-provoking and encouraging, which is an ideal mix.
Weâre going to give this a crack of the whip - so weâve got a little back-office work to do about how the site presents the content, and then weâll need to get our first few bits of content ready and waiting (weâve now got two great people working on producing our test content ) - and then weâll roll out a timescale for switching over, and a clear set of details, including cost.
Totally agree and it is reading practice I need, but now my eyes are not what they were either - need, not large print, but not tiny print either and sufficient contrast! On line people seem to like pale blue on white or what looks like grey on white rather than black! I suppose Iâm just falling apart and am not helping the discussion much!
However, @aran, Level 1 free, monthly for extras - fine, but pay per lesson for level 2 up??? That discourages people from moving fast! It could cause financial difficulty for those with tight budgets! I think you gave to charge a weekly or monthly sum or it just gets too complicated. Let people who want to fly, like our friend from Finland, do so without worrying about money!
) and I still donât understand fast talk on the Pigion podcast which is for ârhai syân dysgu Cymraegâ.
Every 5 lessons, on the lesson download page - so Challenge 5, 10, 15 etc - scroll down under the lesson download, and youâll find the listening exerciseâŚ