Has anyone learnt Welsh due to their interest in Welsh music?

Never heard ardderchog as often as inthe last 3 days. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

p.s. @Novem, @shaun In case you’ve missed it, since it refers to you hefyd!

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@gisella-albertini, @ceri-francis, @Novem - great work!! Fantastic interviews (I’ve only just listened to the show). I personally don’t think any show is complete without Bryn Fon but I won’t hold that against Rhys :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Great idea for a show, and it’s been brilliant to hear so much about dysgwyr this week.

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If day is not such a daft question. When I was a school boy I used to cheer on that amazing Welsh rugby team on the 1970s (a habit I still have with the present team) with my Welsh father. My dear Nan gifted me a Welsh song book so I could learn ‘Hen wlad fy nhadau’. That along with regular visits to Six Bells and the interesting place names around it kindled an interest in Welsh. More recently when when I’ve been to the rugby has made me keen to learn Sospan Fach and Calon Lan. I was delighted to find Duo Lingo has a Welsh course and even more so to discover SSiW when I was looking for supplementary materials for my DL lessons. Now the supplement has decome the main event and the DL has become the supplement.
So you could say that a traditional song book has played some part in my interest in learning the language.

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This was really, really great - I loved it but I knew I would :sunny: That must have been nerve wracking but you sounded so calm! …and it is a cool reason (=random :smile:) to learn Welsh :sunglasses:

…a silly question… - does your name start with a hard ‘g’ or a soft one l? I think Rhys says it both ways at the beginning and the end :smile:

Of course it makes no difference to anything - it’s a funny thing but at all this time on the forum , I’ve been thinking that it is a soft ‘g’ - I will need to change how it sounds it in my head if that’s wrong!

Rich :slight_smile:

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Oh did I, really? :open_mouth: I wasn’t! :sweat_smile:
I was so anxious I was hardly aware of what I was saying, until quite a bit later, thinking back at the experience!

Yeah, I’ve noticed that he said my name in two different ways. :laughing:
First, with a soft ‘g’ is the correct one, so you’ve been right all this time. :wink:

By the way it’s pretty funny that first language and fluent Welsh speakers could really pronounce Italian names and words very easily - the only tricky one is in fact soft g and c (when followed by e or i, that are different).
But oddly enough, they usually tend to automatically go into some “foreign word? let’s pronounce it like English” mode - and get it wrong or just a bit weird.
Of course in my case, nothing compared to how they seem to mess up Saraceno!

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How did I miss this thread? Maybe because I haven’t been checking into the forum enough!

Yes and no. Like many 18 year olds from rural Wales, I went to live in English cities and didn’t encounter the Welsh language every much, and being from a non Welsh speaking part of Wales, I had kind of got used to ignoring it. However I was a regular listener to the John Peel show and that kind of kept the connection alive and that Welsh wasn’t just the language of a handful of old people. Bands such as Datblygu, Llwybr Llaethog, Melys and Gorky’s featured regularly producing music as good as if not better than contemporary English language music
As I stopped being quite so much the mixed up teen, I realised I wanted to speak Welsh and Welsh language pop music was probably the biggest motivation for doing so. If only SSiW existed at the time!
I’m now a Welsh speaker and went to see Melys live on stage for the first time at this years national Eisteddfod. I got to speak to them afterwards and I think they were quite amazed and pleased that they had been an inspiration for someone to learn Welsh who had actually learned to speak Welsh.

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Yes indeed. In fact, I think you could probably say that John Peel was the real inspiration for me learning Welsh, precisely because he played those bands (Datblygu being the most important to me). I didn’t get round to learning Welsh until a long time after his death but he was definitely a major factor in my decision to eventually do it.

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Thank you Nigel :blush:

Yfory 19/10/19 :slightly_smiling_face:

Ffilm ddogfen am yrfa gerddorol a bywyd un o berfformwyr mwyaf carismataidd ac enigmatig Cymru, Meic Stevens. An honest and personal documentary film about musician Meic Stevens.

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