Hello aran,
I got an 8.5 on the first exercise, but no second exercise did materialize on my browser (Chrome on Linux).
Cheers, Michael
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Hello aran,
Sorry, misread your instructions. I just did the Test a second time and got 7.5.
Cheers, Michael
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Hi Michael,
Don’t worry at all. This will work itself out.
There was a time when my wife and I started - that we couldn’t for the life of us remember the difference between ‘still’, ‘need’ and ‘want’. It was a bugbear of ours for about the first 3 weeks. Then it suddenly (and I can’t remember how) just clicked.
Keep at it, don’t strive for perfection - and you’ll be fine 
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Take @aran’s advice - after all, he invented the whole thing, but I just wondered, we do all learn in different ways, is it possible that the more structured ‘Lessons’ would suit you when starting off, better than the Challenges, which do, I think, speed up the learning process?
Oh and Croeso (Welcome) to the Forum, and 7.5 seems a very good score to me, I was told I’d finished with 4.5 when I made mistakes at the 5 lights level, although I got them all right twice! Lack of memory comes with age, I guess! (henddraig = old dragon!)
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Thank you all for your encouraging words. It gave me motivation to try to tackle Challenge 2 again in my lunch break, but I failed again miserably. The new words just don’t seem to stick in my brain at all, and the old words jumble together and don’t come out when I need them.
I will try Challenge 1 a third time in the evening, but I have the feeling that my brain may not be very compatible with the SaySomething approach.
Cheers, Michael
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Hi Michael - tell me a little more about this failing ‘miserably’ - do you mean that you couldn’t produce any Welsh words at all?
You have a strong working memory - which usually makes the process a fair bit easier - so the next thing I want to check is that you don’t have misplaced expectations about what you’re meant to achieve during a session - you’re not meant to be anywhere near getting everything right. At a rough guess, how many of the sentences do you feel you’re somewhere near on?
Learning isn’t a binary experience - it’s a process. If you learn a list of words in the way you do at school, you push and push until you can remember them all perfectly - which is actually a very inefficient approach. What we do here is give you layer after layer of learning, until eventually the first material you encountered has been revisited often enough for your brain to gain conscious control of it.
Multiple repetitions of individual lessons isn’t going to help you at this point. You’d be far better off going the whole way through to Challenge 10 without any repetition, and then revisiting Challenge 1 and seeing what it feels like at that point… 
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Hello aran,
Thank you again for helping me through this. Here is a more detailed account of my experience with Challenge 2:
It started out easy enough with a new word (to say), but as soon as I had to put this into context with the words from Challenge 1 I ran into problems. I remembered a few phrases and words (like ‘I want’, ‘I try’), but some of them (like ‘I still’, ‘I am going to’) I could not recall at all. I tried to retain these phrases, but this just resulted in me not remembering the new words. In addition, I started to mix up all the phrases from Challenge 1, so that I found myself not recalling anything at all.
Approximately 10 minutes in, I could not get any word correctly anymore, and I stopped. My brain feels like a soup now where the English and Welsh phrases swim around but where I can not find a match between them.
Cheers, Michael
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If you hit the wall and can’t get anything at all out in the gaps, then yes, stop, breathe, come and talk it through - excellent decision…
Next questions - are you using the pause button, or running without it?
How would you feel about recording yourself doing the lessons - on something like Soundcloud or Facebook Live? If I could hear exactly what was happening, it would be easier to give useful advice…
Not wanting to undermine the boss in any way, but personally I’m quite glad I didn’t start Challenge 1 as a completely fresh beginner. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d have felt like this too.
I wonder what proportion of people who get on the rails successfully are already familiar with some Welsh and structures from previous exposure / failed attempts at learning? I can imaging that the first few challenges could be - well, pretty challenging, if you’re starting from scratch!
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At my first run through Challenge 1 I did not use the pause button. I realize now that this was a mistake. On my second try through Challenge 1, I used the pause button, but sparingly. This may be the source of my problem. I made copious use of pause during today’s effort with Challenge 2.
That would be an interesting experiment. I would need some time to set up the technical side of things. I’m going to try [<- up to this point I can say this sentence in Welsh ] to record my struggle with Challenge 2 this evening.
Cheers, Michael
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I started as a completely fresh beginner, no exposure at all, but I started with the older Courses instead of the Levels. I didn’t find the first lesson really difficult, and my working memory score was about 4.5, which isn’t great. I’m curious if Course 1 Lesson 1 would feel any different to @Eigentime - although definitely stick with Aran’s help, I’m not meaning to send you off on a different tangent!
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Interesting. I wonder if the courses might have been easier in the very early stages, with less variety of structures? The learning curve at the very beginning has been bugging me for ages, as my Dad repeatedly failed to get hooked over the years. (Having said which, finally he now seems to be, so I may take it all back! )
Anyway I’ll get out of this discussion as I’m not helping the case in hand…
Good luck @Eigentime! Stick with it - it’s a brilliant course!
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I don’t think it was a mistake - we’ve seen a certain amount of evidence that learners adapt to the faster production over time - but it certainly makes it feel tougher, so if you’re uncomfortable with a high number of mistakes, living without the pause button is not an approach you’ll find easy.
If you can crack the technical side of things, it’ll be very interesting to hear you on 2 - my current best guess is that you’re being too hard on yourself in terms of the number of errors, and that it’s the frustration that comes with that which is responsible for you reaching the ‘can’t say anything’ point…
Well, I did it. Kinda. The setup was a bit improvised, I struggled to find the stop button at first, the audio quality is abysmal, and occasionally I could not stop myself from swearing.
If you still, want to listen, I have uploaded the whole mess to Google Drive. Again, I was too frustrated to continue after about 10 minutes - and most of it is awkward silence while I try to remember. I noticed that my frustration rose every time I had not the faintest idea how to translate a particular phrase - which happened more and more often throughout this session. It was particularly irksome when I couldn’t remember even after listening to the translation.
It may well be that my frustration results from me being too hard on myself, but then the question arises how to change that?
Cheers, Michael
Hi and croeso
The way I (just about) manage my frustration is to think – I know more now than when I started. This seems to me to help keep the barrier of frustration as weak as possible. Also I tend to do the challenges in blocks of two or three and then do nothing for the next few days. It is amazing how much I can then remember especially things that I thought I wasn’t remembering at the time.I don’t know if I have explained this very well but I hope it helps a little bit.
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Another quick observation, after I tried to clearly analyze the source of my frustration. It seems to stem from the following situation:
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I am asked to translate some phrase which I am unable to do because I do not remember some part of it.
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I get the “solution” (the translated phrase), but trying to simultaneously concentrate on the part I did not remember and the new part that is trained is too much, and I do not retain either.
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The challenge moves on mercilessly to the next phrase which I possibly can’t translate either.
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I do not get the feeling I have improved at all - neither the new nor the old vocabulary sticks to memory - and I get frustrated.
Maybe there is something I can do after I don’t know an answer?
Cheers, Michael
Again, not wishing to interfere with Aran’s help, but have you tried doing the lessons whilst doing something else? I cannot do the lessons if I am focusing solely on the lesson. I find the intensity makes me start to panic. I have done hem variously whilst helping my wife ironing, washing up, pottering around the house. It may help?
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And yet there are a number of five or six word phrases in there that you got correct… so you definitely have improved…
Interesting. I can hear it’s hard for you, which I wouldn’t have expected with your working memory, so some follow up questions:
Do you speak any other languages apart from English to conversational fluency?
What was your experience of language learning at school like?
What was your favourite subject at school?
And… could you do a similar recording of the first 10 minutes of Challenge 1?
Hello @Eigentime.
Warm welcome to the forum first!
… wait a minute! Is this another me?
Now, on the sirious note …
I am (once mentioned here) Tatjana from Slovenia who is learning Welsh from the scratch (ups, I was learning it from the scratch a while ago) and if I wouldn’t know you’re a man I’d think my twin me came on here. I’ve started with Lessons (old course) as there was no challenges yet on here when I came to learn the language but even now, after doing (almost) all material I find Challenges (new course you’re doing) harder then old material especially at the beginning. However, some suggest here you might rather try to go through old Course first. I strongly don’t recommend this though. If you’d begin from the scratch with old material then yes but now, when you’ve already plunged into new one, the old Lessons might make more confusion in your head as new Challenges might already done so stick with what you’ve started.
I’m extreamly happy you’ve started with South version (version with @Iestyn) for the solely selfish reason of the fact that I’m doing it too.
Saying I thought my twin me has come on here it might help doing a quick glance through Tatjana - Progress Reports topic and find some answers to your problems there. (But don’t get panicked as there are 600+ posts. Pick what you think is useful for you.) Not that my progress was any shinny stars at the beginning but you’d find many useful advises there from @aran and the rest of the forum members who helped me, encouraged me and pushed me further when I was at the edge of stopping to learn. You will see I had many of your problems too and that there’s always a solution to them one way or another if you are really willing to try and change your thinking a bit. You can leave my moanings out if you want … Oh, and one more thing: don’t measure progress as I did. It will frustrate you even more and actually does not do much good to the process though.
From the recording you’ve made I can feel very strong frustration even before you begin the lessons. Yes, yes, I was frustrated many times before even beginning the lesson, too, but people here FINALLY taught me I just have to take it all as a bit of fun. It’s hard to force yourself not to think about mistakes but in order to you’d learn well you’ll just have to be prepared to do just this. I don’t say you should ignore mistakes, but just collect them somewhere in the rare of your brains and try to correct them next time. If you do the same mistake twice, third, fourth time … no problem. There will come the time it’ll all click and come into placer. Oh, and it will maybe help if you’d speak more boldly, louder even if you say things wrong. At least one word you’ll always say right, I’m sure and speaking louder and at least trying to imitate confidence might energize your learning and you’ll feel much better, believe me. Just spit out what yu think is right and at one point you’ll find yourself being aware you actually said things at least half right if not totally correctly.
To make your thoughts a bit lighter - even now when I’m practically waiting for the Level 3 to come out (South didn’t see the light of the day yet but it will soon), I have those very quiet moments when I just can’t say anything at all. I can’t remember anything but what I do when I hear Cat saying things? Usually I’m trying to say the whole sentence I’ve heard from her simultaniously with Iestyn (yes he speaks a bit quick, but try to catch at least some of it). So, don’t torture yourself when you can’t get things right or you can’t remember them. You’re doing quite OK but your thinking will have to be a bit altered and your perfectionism should be pushed away a bit.
@a_jay did you mean I should post a link to Tiny questions with quick answers thread? Yes, there might be some useful answers there but I’d considder to read them a bit later when being further in the lessons maybe.
To be honest, more advises I don’t have. Aran is the right person to guide you through your problems and frustrations just like he guided me and those posting before me said everythign better then me anyway.
Since you’re new on the forum though you might read Really useful ‘How to’ stuff and other great posts topic especially if you have any problems with how to do stuff on the forum (posting a photo, sending a PM, finding members etc). There are some other interesting stuff also.
Here are also many more other topics which might bring some answers to your questions and problems so if you have some time, you can cruise through the topics and read what seams interesting to you.
Oh, and, hearing from your recording, you’re from German speaking country, aren’t you, so English is your second language already but of course the learning of it was much more different then this system of SSi is I believe. First, as I had to and many others, I believe, you’ll have to adapt to the system itself particulatly not thinking about it as if it wouldn’t be suitable for you. It’s suitable to anyone - for some more for some less though - we just have to change our previously gained “imagination” how learning languages should look and feel like and everything would be OK.
Well, I hope my (yes I know … too long) post might help at least a bit and persuade you to go further a bit boldly, louder and with more confidence. You’ve begun the journey from the Welsh learner to the Welsh speaker. No matter how long this journey will be, you’ll come to the end of the way at one point, becomming a Welsh speaker. But … don’t think the journey ends there. No, at that point the journey is ounly about to begin.
Oh, and Aran, by the way … my result of test is still 4,5 the 1st time and 3,5 the second … ayayay … me forgetful. But I’ve noticed just what I’ve described above. I’ve got frustrated with if I’ll manage to remember the dots and the result got worse. (just to say)
My feeling is, that I have basically only learned the first half of the first challenge and that I have not made any progress since. I had a lot of fun that first time even though I did struggle through the second half. That lack of progress is my main problem at the moment.
Another observation here: I have now worked through the first few minutes of the second challenge three times, but I can not remember the translations for ‘say’ and ‘something’ (the first two new words of that challenge). It’s this lack of progress that gets to me.
My first language is German. I also speak French.
It was quite a disaster. I especially hated the French lessons and just about managed to get a passing grade. Later, I spent a year in France and learned more in each month than in four years of school.
Mathematics. No contest. (I am a mathematician now).
Sure, no problem. It will have to wait for tomorrow 'though - I have to get up at 5 am and it is getting late for me.
Cheers, Michael
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