I have to say I sadly cancelled my subscription this week. I felt under too much pressure to go at the speed the course wanted me to, and I’d get to sunday and realise I was going to get another email the following day.
Can’t be dealing with that sort of pressure. Good luck to everyone else who can!
I’m still 4 weeks or so behind Lee, if you stick around, I’d be glad of some company in the tortoise corner!
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That’s a shame Lee, but you don’t have to follow the structured course (the one with the weekly emails, extra tasks and support), you can subscribe on a standard subscription and work through the challenges at whatever pace you wish with no pressure - and this forum and the Slack WSP group will still be here to help you 
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Thank you for posting this, Lydia. I am in exactly the same position! It has given me a new impetus to keep on keeping on, as I now see that others are experiencing the same, so maybe it’s not that I’m just a dud!! I am finding that, while the new stuff is rather difficult, prior challenges seem to pop up, sometimes when you least expect them. I’m not sure if it is frowned on to write down the vocabulary, but I find it helps me considerably. I have a full set of all the words and phrases we’ve had so far and I go back and say them out loud (not all at once, of course), then try to make up simple sentences using them. I’m not suggesting you should do that because, as I say, it may not be the way it should be don. Just saying that it seems to be helping me. Anyway, good luck, Lydia, and know “you are NOT alone”!! Joyce xx
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Ooh! Does this really matter? I couldn’t possibly do it every day for so many reasons. I’m just beginning and I find the challenges a bit long at the moment, so I often only do half. I have to write everything down and go back over it.
I don’t stress over it because it was the same when I was learning Spanish, I used a podcast and had to constantly rewind at the start, but picked up as time went by.
Is there any time limit? I hope not!
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No, there’s no time limit! With the structured course you get weekly tasks and emails, but you can always request a pause if things get too far ahead of you. With the standard subscription (no weekly tasks or emails), you can take all the time you want.
One other tip - writing everything down and going back over it might feel like it helps, but very often it actually slows you down because it interrupts the ear-to-brain process by sticking eyes in there… and this course (although many do write bits down) is specifically designed for that ear-to-brain-skipping-the-eyes process to work as efficiently as possible. But don’t worry - there is no “one-size-fits-all”, no competition, and definitely no time limit!
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I find the same with he said to me etc. I learm pictorially so if i cant picture the words i get trapped sometimes. A video clip of him saying to me would be great!
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I wave my arms. Push, pull, give, take, to me, to him etc. I seems to help me remember.
Sue
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Oh that was one that took me ages to get right! 
However this reminded me of your other thread: it always made me think of a mysterious object flying around in outer space and even shapeshifting a bit - just like the sequence of sounds I pronounced, that was slightly different every time! 
I actually managed to store it in my memory the day I realized that gwydred was basically like Italian “vetro” (that means “glass” in fact). Then “neu” is often just cut to “ne” and “ddau” is the number (and also like Italian “due”,that is “two”).
It’s funny that today I read through the comments and thought “that’s weird that so many people have got French popping up in their minds, since they seem so different to me”.
But then, writing about the glass or two I realized that maybe it’s the latin root in so many words that if you have some knowledge of French or Spanish gets your brain to bring that up.
While for me it’s Italian. (just random thoughs, though)!
As for keeping up with the course…some days/weeks/challenges it just flows easily, some days it’s just slow and complicated. Like others here said, I would say…just relax, take your time, and don’t worry - one of the great things about this course is you can take as long as you like or need! 
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I never thought about the connection between gwdred and vetro. Interesting.
Concerning the fact that so many people seem to get mixed up with French, I suggest that it’s not because the Welsh and French have any underlying similarity (even though that similarity may exist). Rather I think that it’s because so many people in the UK learn French as a second language at school, and subconsciously we are getting our non-mother tongues confused as we learn. I myself learned French at school in England for 5 years. When I moved to Israel and started speaking Hebrew, I was constantly mixing up French words until I became more or less fluent in Hebrew. Now, when I’m trying to learn Welsh, I often use a Hebrew word by mistake, usually when it sounds like a Welsh word which means something completely different.
Interesting idea though - I wonder what other people’s thoughts are on the matter?
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I think that @Baruch is right about this. I learned French and Latin at school. The French more or less remains - I can still read it though I was never much good at speaking. The Latin is mostly gone. Then I learned a bit of German, Italian and Russian later . It’s the French that mostly comes to mind when I am thinking of what to say in Welsh, though there are certain phrases from the other languages that seem to have stuck and pop up unexpectedly.
Sue
Oh, and if I try to think how I would say something in French, I just can’t any more. The Welsh has taken over.
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That’s interesting.
I think for me Welsh cannot mix with the first foreign language I’ve learnt because it’s English, and I’m using that to learn Welsh!
The second foreign language I’ve learnt is French but it’s too close to my mother tongue (not so for English native speakers) and probably stored slightly differently in my brain maybe?
The third language I’ve attempted learning (and not really succeeded despite having heard it since childhood) is German,and this, yes tends to mix with Welsh a bit - although oddly, mostly the other way round:
If I ever try to recall some German, I have Welsh pop up in my mind instead!
It reminds me of this thread:
:Interesting book on the advantages of learning multiple languages at the same time
P.s. sorry @Lydia_N for the digression!
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I agree; it’s a very interesting topic.
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It is interesting (no apology necessary @gisella-albertini ! My mum had a brain tumour some years back (she’s fine) - we were discussing the areas of her brain it affected. I did ask her neurologist if anyone had ever woken up speaking a different language. Apparently it had happened to her once, but with a patient who had learned that language as a child (and had thought they had ‘forgotten’ it. So I guess we are stimulating our language centres and things will get jiggled about!
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I don’t understand why people get different languages confused. I’m on my 11th language now and it doesn’t happen with me. I find when I start practicing one language, I just ‘click into’ it and naturally bring that language to the forefront of my mind. So I go into ‘Welsh mode’ when I’m going through the SSI Welsh mp3s, for example, or ‘Spanish mode’ as soon as I start speaking Spanish, and so on.
If you’re getting confused between languages, something is wrong. I think you are perhaps not relaxed enough when learning, which is going to hinder learning. But let me tell you that the brain DOES naturally separate out every language you learn, almost as if it puts them in separate folders that can be accessed as and when you need them, but that don’t interfere with one another. I don’t know the exact science behind how it does this, but that’s been my experience anyway.
I think that I didn’t explain the phenomenon clearly enough above (I said “subconsciously we are getting our non-mother tongues confused as we learn”) when really it seems to be a case of occasionally confusing similar-sounding words in different languages, or using the right word from the wrong language. I don’t think that we’re talking about getting whole languages mixed up.
Furthermore, even if people do get confused when learning a new language, it’s just part of the learning process like any mistake, and it is definitely not wrong !
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Definitely this one in my case and in the case of others that I speak to. There are little set phrases that pop up - sometimes because I don’t yet know an equivalent in Welsh.
Sue
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First of all, very glad your mum is fine, and that you enjoy the digression too.
About people waking up speaking different languages, it’s funny you mention it, cause I had accidentally read a few articles on this topic a couple of weeks ago!
it seemed, in fact that some of the cases that had been presented as such by tabloid newspapers were actually exactly as the case you’ve just described.
Or a few others, a sudden difficulty in pronouncing a few sounds correctly that accidentally reminded foreign accents - but were not.
Speaking of language learning and brain: now it’s a bit too long of a story to write it all here in a post and I don’t even know exactly why it was like that, but for me the hardest language to learn to speak (not reading and writing, that was alright) was actually my first language: Italian!
There were probably other factors as well, but I have the impression that learning English - which is more concise and has a much easier structure - helped me improve a lot also my eloquence in my mother tongue.
Maybe keeping on learning languages, or at least Welsh which is enough for me now, I’ll understand even more of how this all works!
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Well, for all previous languages…I was at school! Of course I was NOT relaxed while learning them!
While for Welsh, I did most of SSiW challenges comfortably sitting on a deckchair in the shade on the beach, how and when I wanted. I couldn’t ask for more. 
But I’ve been reflecting on this topic and I think something similar to what many others described here, did/does happen to me when I speak languages I’ve learnt or sort-of-learnt a long time ago, but I rarely use (like French, or German).
For me it’s usually English popping up, because I know it better than any other language and use it really often.
But since I’m also focused on Welsh, I sometimes get the Welsh word in my head, even though I’m way less proficient in this language than French.
I would guess, in this case, my brain “workflow” is something like:
- I’m trying to communicate with non-Italians so I’m supposed to use a foreign language
- I want to express it in language X, but I can’t remember the word(s)
- Let’s scan memory for other foreign languages
- Match found - lets use that word, then!
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I agree. If that’s what your brain is doing, it can’t be “wrong!”
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