On my way back from Rhuthun to Wrecsam, I popped into the fish and chip shop in the village of Coedpoeth for some perfectly acceptable fish and chips, but, sadly, less than perfect choice of language options.
You would hope, with a fully Welsh name like Coedpoeth (can English speaking tourists even pronounce it?) that asking for a chip supper in Welsh would be no problem. But no, I got the all-too-frequent “sorry, I don’t speak Welsh” from staff who CAN say “Coedpoeth” perfectly (it’s their village) but all the other words are in English.
Anyway, apparently the young lady who served me WOULD like to learn Welsh - well she “would like to be bi-lingual”, so I take it that the results of learning are more attractive than the (usual) process. I can understand from experience that people don’t want to face years and years of college classes with uncertain outcomes. Cue the PLUG for SSiW. Ideally, I should try to have some business cards with me sometime to give people a lasting reminder, but NEXT time I am served by the same lady in the chip shop I can casually ask if she has “looked up SSiW online yet” …
A spurious link, but I have suggested SSIW to a South African colleague so he can learn Welsh and have ready access to radio commentary for the 2021 Lions tour to South Africa.
The past couple of weeks I’ve been asking open ended questions about people’s thoughts and learning a 2nd language including Welsh.
One of my English friends asked me for the best way to learn Welsh.
Two days later he’s starting SSiW lesson 2 and wrote “Dwi’n mynd i trio dysgu Cymraeg” on his Facebook page!
I didn’t get a chance to spread the word about SSiW yesterday… but a total stranger in one of the facebook groups I belong to asked about recommendations for local Spanish classes - so I spread the word about SSiS instead!
I was talking to someone at a wedding on Saturday (who lives in Llandwrog). He was asking what I’d used to learn Welsh, I said “Dwi’n defnyddio wefan…” And straight away he said “saysomethingin.com? Dwi’n defnyddio 'na i ddysgu Sbaeneg”. He was very complimentary of the course
When I was in Wales the weekend before last, my friend was saying he had tried to download Duolingo but it doesn’t work on his iphone4. He has done one Welsh evening class - I gave SSIW a big plug, (although not sure if it works on iphone4 either?).
Unrelated but depressing - his daughter’s friends had been told they could not take A level Welsh at their (English medium) school in Penarth, because there were not enough pupils - she said there were 10! Classes much smaller than that are running at my son’s comp in London, one year they did German with only 2.
Then on the Sunday we went to Bristol for a get together with people who share the same rare eye condition as my husband, many of whom have been taking part in a clinical trial of gene therapy. There are less than 20 of these in the UK. Sitting near us were a couple with Welsh accents and I got up courage to ask “Siarad Cymraeg?”. Indeed they did, they were from Llandysul. I didn’t get to use much Welsh as we weren’t directly next to each other and it felt a bit rude to speak over someone else. I did manage to say that I was learning and she asked me where I was learning, and I told her a bit about SSIW.
Then later I was talking to another one of the trial subjects and he said he went to Ynys Mon every year on holiday, and when his daughter started University they were all planning to move to Bangor. I asked if he’d thought of learning Welsh and he said, yes he thought he should, so I gave SSIW another plug!
Finally yesterday at work we were talking about languages as my friend is about to have a baby and bring her up speaking English and Estonian. Another colleague was saying she was very bad at languages but “what wouldn’t I pay if someone could just download one into my head”. I told her about SSIW and suggested she give Spanish a try (or indeed Welsh).
Not really hard sell, which isn’t my style, as I don’t deliver it convincingly, but just an honest plug.
Yesterday, some friends were asking me if I listen to CDs when driving and if not, what did I listen to. This led on to my tablet-based Welsh lessons and their surprise that I could be speaking the Welsh language after a few months and also some Spanish and Manx after a few hours.
End result: one of the friends asked for the web site address, which he now has in his possession.
I have now lost count of how many people have asked me about learning Welsh from my posters on the ward. This either means that loads of people have asked me or I’m not very good at counting
Just had three hours talking in Welsh with a Cymraes here in Kochi, Japan. She is learning Tamil to better communicate with her boyfriend`s family, and he wants to learn Welsh to better communicate with her family. What better way do we know?
