I'm a beginner having difficulty telling the consonants apart

Welsh General / Questions
#62

Well, I encourage people to test moving forwards without backtracking, because backtracking can get people stuck in over-repeating to the point where they get sick of it! But backtracking in and of itself won’t do you any damage, and I think most people feel the need if they’ve got something that really isn’t sticking :sunny:

I’d call bravely trying out something you’re not sure about a spectacular success! The more you know about your own learning, from trying out different strategies, the stronger your position.

If you were getting something out for somewhere towards half the time, then it’s very likely that you would in time start to adapt neurologically - but it’s far more important that you feel emotionally committed to the process, so it seems to me that going back to pauses is the right thing for you at the moment.

Do you know how strong your working memory is? If you give this a whirl, we’ll have an idea of where you fit compared to other SSiW learners:

http://www.cogmed.com/working-memory-challenge

Some other suggestions - I think you’d be well advised to steer away from repeating the long sentences in English - just have a go at however much of them stays in your mind, and don’t worry about the rest of them - you’ll still be getting valuable input from hearing the complete structures in Welsh.

Three or four times is okay for repetition - shouldn’t end up making you want to stab yourself - but you are doing the very common thing of setting your sights too high per individual session - what you’ve described is a very, very high level of productive control, and I’ve literally sat and watched people go through these sessions with about a 10% ‘correct’ rate but still have successful conversations at the end. I’d encourage you to think about restricting your repetitions to once per lesson (so 2 runs through per session), and accepting whatever level of productive ‘success’ that gets you to (from what you’ve said, I’m pretty sure it’ll be a lot higher than 10%!).

Small, silly mistakes are absolutely, utterly unimportant. If I were you, I wouldn’t even count those as mistakes - all that stuff gets easier when you have enough exposure, which is what the course is designed to give you - but it does require being willing to laugh off the little ones. A good rule of thumb is that every mistake you notice gives you a little extra learning (and the ones you don’t notice can be left until later…;-)).

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#63

You’re welcome! It’s what the site is for! And though reading and writing along with SSiW was useful for myself and everyone I know in my area, if it wouldn’t be for you, it wouldn’t be for you! May well be different for people outside Wales- and even for non-Welsh people. But whatever floats your boat! Excellent to hear you are coming on well.

“Can anyone tell me what Rob Brydon says in this clip and what Joanna Page says in return”
Rob Brydon does not speak Welsh, and I don’t think he is the sort of person who would have too much interest in getting it right. A few random words at the beginning, " da iawn, Croeso am fynd" if I remember right, but the rest may just be gibberish. Certainly I think it would be a waste of time to spend too much time listening to it closely and try rating to work it out. Joanna Page say is “es i (somewhere) gyda ffrindiau neithiwr” - I went (somewhere [I think clubbing]) with friends last night)". No idea if she speaks Welsh.

Don’t you take my word for it though- others will have heard better!

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#64

I’m answering your whole post! I have experienced all of that!
My problem with keeping up is partly physical. I have airways full of gunk and can’t talk quickly for long. Going back to using the pause button was wonderful and I am not going to try without except for shorter sentences.
I am forever forgetting the end of the sentence. I sometimes say…“er…whatever!” listen to Cat and add, “That!” Sometimes I simply say something which makes sense! I don’t thank it matters. @aran isn’t actually trying to test the failing memory or poor concentration of older learners like me, he is trying to get us to rabbit on and I’m fine at that!!!
I’d think that finding sentences in Cymraeg in your head is a very good sign!! Doesn’t it mean you are processing!
Oh, and being so long on the Forum you have no time to learn is a problem we definitely share!! It doesn’t matter much for me as my object was to deal with hiraeth, learning or re-learning yr hen iaith is an added bonus!!

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#65

@aran, thanks for the guidance and encouragement. You’re probably right that I’m setting my sights too high, and being a bit too self-critical. I’m trying to relax a bit, and to keep in mind that ultimately I’m supposed to be doing this for fun, and for mental exercise, not to pass an exam. It’s very hard to drop the habits of a lifetime, though.

I did the Working Memory Challenge you suggested, and I scored 4.5. I did it again, and scored 4.5. I did it a third time, and managed 5.5. I have no idea how that compares with most people. Does that score tell you anything useful? (If it’s less than average, you won’t hurt my feelings by saying so. It might even help explain why I’m having difficulty.)

You make a good point about emotional commitment. At the moment I’m finding that pausing frequently, and backtracking and replaying, is making me feel more enthusiastic towards SSiW than if I stay off the Pause button and just let the recording run and never backtrack. I accept that it may not be producing the speediest progress, but I can live with that, because it means I am less frustrated. I feel I’m getting more on top of it, I feel I’m making better progress, even if by any objective measure I’m actually not.

Whenever I just let the recording run on its own, Cat stops being a helpful teacher and becomes an annoying know-it-all classmate. To everyone reading this: did any of you have the experience, back in your early schooldays, of your teacher asking you a question, and while you were gathering your thoughts to answer, your smug show-off classmate would shout out the answer first? If you had a good teacher, she’d say “OK, Hermione, we know you know the answer, but please give the other children a chance,” but even so, you’d still feel a bit thick. You wanted to say “I CAN answer this - if you’ll just give me a minute to think. I can’t do it as quickly as Hermione, but I’m not stupid.”

Well, that’s pretty much how I feel now if I don’t pause the recording. On all but the very shortest and easiest sentences, Cat (a.k.a. Hermione) jumps in while I’m still gathering my thoughts and taking a breath.

And here’s the real irony. During my primary school years, to my utter mortification now, I was Hermione, most of the time. I was the smug little so-and-so showing off how much I knew, how easily I could spell, how fast I could calculate. I had reached my teens before I first encountered any academic subject I struggled with (it was physics), and gained some inkling of just how much some learners struggle and how it doesn’t help to have some more gifted classmate parading their superior abilities. Struggling with physics was a well-deserved lesson in humility, and helped change me from a horrible smug [rude word deleted] into someone with a bit more empathy.

So here am I now, all these decades later, once again feeling pretty humble and a bit thick, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I can live with those feelings. I can live with the mistakes I’m making. As long as I get a chance to make those mistakes - in other words, as long as I can find a way to shut Hermione up and give me a chance to speak. So that’s why I’m still using the Pause button. It’s the only way I can keep Hermione quiet and keep me from wanting to slap her. As long as I can use the Pause button, Cat stops being the insufferable Hermione, and goes back to being the gentle teacher Cat, either confirming that I got it right, or showing me the right way to say it if I got it wrong.

And sometimes I really do need a long time to gather my thoughts, grope towards the right answer, and say something close to what I should be saying. Other learners are probably much faster at getting the Welsh out than I am at this stage.

Here’s an example. Suppose @Iestyn gives this sentence: “You don’t need to say why you will not do it”. (I can’t remember whether that sentence is on any of the recordings. I just assembled it out of the words I’ve learned so far.)

This is how I respond. Lines in quotes are what I say aloud. Lines in italics are what I’m thinking. Ellipses are pauses. Apologies for any wrong Welsh spelling - I had to look up the spelling, and I may not have got it right, but I hope you’ll at least know which words I’m trying to say.

USING THE PAUSE BUTTON
Iestyn: You don’t need to say why you will not do it.
(I hit the Pause button.)
…
“Ti ddim yn…”
Ti ddim yn, ti ddim yn… what’s the word for “need”? Hang on, it’s not “ti ddim yn” at all. It’s that funny construction which means something like “there is a need”. What is it? It has “isie” in it. What is it again?
“Mae isie i fi…”
No, that’s not right. “Fi” is “I”. This is a YOU sentence.
“Mae isie i ti…”
That’s still not right. The sentence was “You DON’T need”. It needs a negative word. What’s the negative construction? I remember! “Does dim”.
“Does dim isie i fi…”
No, you’re back to “fi”. It’s “ti”.
“Does dim isie i ti…”
“Does dim isie i ti siarad…”
No, not “siarad”. You’re always mixing up “speak” and “say”.
“Does dim isie i ti ddweud…”
What’s the word for “why?”
“…beth…”
No, that’s “what”.
“…sut…”
No, that’s “how”.
… pam!"
Got it! Now, what was the sentence again?
“Does dim isie i ti… ddweud… pam…”
I can’t even remember the rest of the sentence in English. How did it go again? “You don’t need to say why you will not do it.”
“Does dim isie i ti ddweud pam… ti…”
No, “ti” is for present tense. You WILL not. It doesn’t start with “ti”. What does it start with?
I can’t remember.
Think through the “will” paradigm. I will, you will, I will not… Those phrases don’t start with “dwi” or “ti”. What do they start with?
“…Bydda…”
No, that’s positive. That’s the start of “I will” and “You will”. What’s the negative form?
“…Fydda…”
Yes. And then…? You will not? Fydda… what?
…I can’t remember.
Fydda what?
…I can’t remember.
Fydda what?
I really can’t remember. Why can’t I remember? I’ve done “You will not” sentences at least twenty times. I’ll try saying the whole sentence from the beginning to see if my subconscious kicks in. How did it go in English? You don’t need to say why you will not do it."
“Does dim isie i ti… ddweud… pam… fydda…”
“Does dim isie i ti ddweud pam fydda…”
“Does dim isie i ti ddweud pam fydda…”
…
…
Nope, it’s not working. I know the “do it” bit at the end of the sentence, but not the “you will not”.

And at this point I hit the Play button to hear Cat say it.

As you can imagine, the above mental gymnastics take about 30-60 seconds, much longer than the few seconds Cat gives me to say it.

And if I DON’T use the Pause button, here’s what happens:

Iestyn: “You don’t need to say why you will not do it.”
…
Me: “Ti ddym in…”
…
Cat: “Does dim isie i ti…” etc.

And so it goes, for almost every one of the sentences. I get out only a word or two before I dry up, and more often than not, whatever I do get out is completely wrong. I usually know it’s wrong as soon as I’ve said it, and given enough time, I can correct it, but if I don’t pause the recording, I don’t get that time. Cat gets in first, and I’m left thinking grumpily “I could have got there, if only you’d given me time!”

And that agonisingly slow performance, which I’m sure is causing all you fluent Welsh speakers to grimace in pain at how your beautiful language is being mangled, is after completing all the lessons up to and including Lesson 6 Part 2, including playing them all at least three times each.

I’m aware that what I’m doing at the moment when I work through the sessions is merely groping towards the right Welsh sentence, until I eventually land on it. (e.g. No, it’s not “I”, it’s “you”. No, it’s not present tense, it’s past. No, it’s not “I am”, it’s “I am NOT”. No, it’s not “I know”, it’s “I think”.)

And I’m aware that that’s not speaking in a foreign language. That’s just puzzle solving. What I’m doing at the moment is no more truly speaking a language than doing a crossword is speaking a language.

What I need to achieve - and I’m nowhere near it yet - is to hear a sentence in English and have the Welsh for it spring immediately to my tongue. For instance, to hear “You will not say…” in English, and have the Welsh for it immediately in my brain, not have to grope towards it painfully in stages, via “I am… You are… You were… You will… You will not… You will not speak… You will not say…”

And that, I’m afraid, is a long way off at this stage. But at least I’m still here, still doing the course.

Apologies to all those whose comments and questions I still haven’t responded to. Partly lack of time, mostly feeling too mentally exhausted. Tomorrow, I hope. I still very much appreciate everyone’s comments.

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#66

Rob Brydon doesn’t speak Welsh? Really? You mean he’s probably faking it, with a few phrases half-remembered from school?

He did a good job of fooling me. He spoke so fast and smoothly, I assumed he was fluent.

Thanks for the translation.

#67

You’re welcome - pity it wasn’t more use to you! (always assuming what I said was right! Which no one should ever do…)
(again, assuming it was the case…) Well, I’d say words rather than phrases - I’m not sure any two of them put together in the way they were made sense! But you have to remember that he is Welsh and lives in Wales - he will have been surrounded by and heard the language his whole life, even if he had no interest in learning it, and a lot of its pronunciation will be completely natural to him - indeed, sometimes how he would pronounce English! - so it’s not surprising it sounded genuine to you! So I certainly wouldn’t describe it as fooling you, if that were to imply anything about you :blush:

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Writing a booklet about the SSi Method - looking for your experiences
#68

This is absolutely the way forward for you, then - you’re making all the right decisions so far, I’d say.

Yes, it’s really hard to drop the habits of a lifetime - nothing easy about it at all - but keep at it, because the more you can play with it, the more you can laugh, the easier it will be to keep going… :slight_smile:

Aha - I suspected as much. That’s a very low working memory score - the lowest I’ve come across so far was 4 - and that means that this approach is inevitably tougher for you.

But there’s some good news! Which is - the approach WILL still work for you - it just needs more time, and more patience - but settling down to a strategy that makes you feel emotionally comfortable, and keeping in mind that it’s not a race, is EXACTLY the right way forward for you.

So work through the sessions in the way that feels right for you - and come on here for a nudge if you think that you’ve got stuck on any particular lesson, and are in danger of over-repeating - and then when you get to the end of Course 1, you can start a pattern of revisiting the last couple of lessons every month or so (while you push on with Course 2) - and over time, your speed of processing will increase because you will start to process the language in larger chunks.

And - congratulations. It takes real guts to stick at this approach when you have a low working memory score. But your courage and determination WILL pay off… :slight_smile:

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#69

Thank you so much for your encouragement, @aran. What you’ve said also lends weight to one of my reasons for wanting to learn Welsh in the first place, which is: I’m constantly trying to find new ways to engage my brain, new skills to learn, in an attempt to prevent or at least slow down any decline in cognitive function.

I’ve had a lifelong love for the sound of Celtic languages, so when casting around for some new way to exercise my brain cells, I thought: why not try to learn a Celtic language? I’m sure I once had a better working memory than this - I used to blitz exams - so if it’s true that my memory really is starting to decline, then the more I try to stretch it, the better.

The woman next door to me took up the violin as a complete beginner in her fifties, for much the same reason as I’m learning Welsh. And she got pretty good at the violin, too! I envy her. I can’t do the same - I used to play the piano, until arthritis made that almost impossible - but as long as I can still hear, I can still speak. So I’ll keep plugging away at Welsh, at least for now.

I’ll never be your top student, but if I can reach a standard where I can hold a basic conversation without embarrassing myself, I’ll be happy.

The clock is striking midnight here in Australia, and I’m about to turn into a pumpkin. Good night.

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#70

Matilda,

It’s amazing how much you have learned so far. You’re summary of the way that lessons go was brilliant and funny - I can totally relate to most of that and I bet that I’m not the only one. If you do another ten lessons and then look back at a lesson you are doing now, I bet that you’ll be amazed at how easy it then seems. Maybe it could be a short term memory thing as Aran says, but after a while perhaps you start to recall bits in blocks more than individual words, I don’t know?

If as Aran says 4.5, 4.5, 5.5 is low, well you’ve got some company - I’m only half a point ahead of you 4.5, 5.5 and 6 and based on age I should probably be a bit more ahead. So I should be struggling on SSIW as well and I do quite often, but I quite enjoy that and it seems to get easier.

P.S. I am that person who always loses the keys, can never find my phone or the TV remote and has generally a very very very short attention span - asking people to write it down and letting them know in advance that I will forget it if they don’t remind me is one of my lifelong habits. No point asking me to get something from the shop without writing it down first and I rarely ask for directions because I’ll never remember what someone was telling me anyway. When I was seventeen my dad asked me where my mother’s car was and I completely forgot that I had been out driving it and had left it at my friends (and no I would never drink and drive or anything like that even when I was young and less responsible)!. Unfortunately, I can never get away with using it as an excuse for forgetting Birthdays and anniversaries though.

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#71

Stretching the memory is always, always good! - but let me be specifically clear about this - I’m not suggesting you’ve got any age-related memory decline here - while that’s a complicated field, it’s not usually chiefly about working memory.

Working memory is a very specific subset of memory - effectively, it’s your ability to keep multiple items in mind at once - and it makes perfect sense that you could have blitzed all your exams because your learning strategies weren’t forcing you to lean heavily on your working memory - most approaches to learning in a school setting don’t require much working memory.

Having a weak working memory absolutely does NOT imply that your other memory functions are weak - and the pattern of getting material into your short-term memory, and then building those memories into long-term memories, can function fine irregardless of your working memory :slight_smile:

But you’re absolutely, absolutely right that continued learning is a HUGELY valuable part of brain health :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

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#72

Oh so was I!! Then we moved and I found out that ‘know-it-alls’ with funny accents from ‘foreign parts’ are not very popular in Yorkshire, especially if they are hopeless at sports!! So I stopped trying and, in fact; learned never to do better than middling. Sometime thereafter, I lost the ability to be Hermione!! (At Uni)!!!
However, languages were never my forte!! Your mental process sort of mirrors mine, but in a much better informed way!! I freeze, rethink, and may get the right words. Else I get a near miss and put up with it!!!

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#73

Thought I’d squeeze in one more reply before I head off to bed. (It’s after 1am here as I write this.)

You didn’t miss it. I was deliberately vague. I’ve been on the internet a very long time, almost since it first arrived in Australia. A few very unpleasant experiences (my own, and other people’s) have taught me to be extremely careful what I put online about myself. A friend, for example, was once found by her abusive ex-partner because she posted under her real name in what she thought was a fairly obscure special-interest forum such as this one. This was back in the 1990s, and because the internet was still fairly young in those days, she had no idea how powerful search engines are and how there is really no such thing as “obscure”.

I’ve been wary ever since, because I too have people in my past that I don’t particularly want to be found by. Matilda is not actually my real name. It’s a pseudonym I sometimes use in international forums to indicate I’m Australian (Waltzing Matilda, geddit?). And also because Matilda “Miss Matty” Jenkyns in Cranford is one of my favourite literary characters, and just because I think it’s a pretty name.

Even if I gave just my real first name and not my surname, I’ve already posted enough information that someone who knows me personally could join the dots and identify me. If I get comfortable enough in this community, I will probably reveal my real name to individuals privately, but for public purposes in this forum, I will answer to Matilda.

As for my location, I’m on the east coast of Australia. That’s where the majority of the Australian population lives, so I’m very likely to be in the same time zone as most Australian SSiW members. (I’m very surprised to hear that SSiW has such a large Australian membership! Clearly, Welsh is a much more popular language here than I imagined. That is very encouraging.)

I am interested in Skyping, but not quite yet. Now that I’m looking at the spelling of consonants whenever a new word is introduced (although still trying to ignore the spelling of vowels), that is going a long way towards helping me resolve my hearing difficulties, so that’s one hurdle I’ve cleared. As for making conversation in Welsh: I’m still only at the beginning of Lesson 7. My progress is slow, because I pause and repeat so often. I’m comfortable with my rate of progress, but I don’t feel confident enough making conversation in Welsh yet, and am likely to freeze like a deer in the headlights if I don’t understand something. Let me get a few more lessons under my belt, and see how I feel then. But it’s nice to know there are people in my time zone who may be willing to help!

Yes, I am doing the original Course 1, and it’s good to know the quality does improve later on. Incidentally, at the suggestion of someone else on this page (can’t remember who offhand), I listened to a couple of the Northern Welsh lessons. Partly to make the acquaintance of Aran and Catrin, and partly out of curiosity to see how the northern dialect differs from the southern one. Although @aran has the most beautiful diction, I found the consonants in the northern recording even harder to understand than the southern one. The Introduction was fine - very clear - but in Lessons 1 and 2, there’s a distinct echo in the room, which for me causes the consonants to blur even more than in the southern course. Maybe the room where Aran and Catrin recorded had hard walls with sound bouncing off them, or maybe the recording equipment was more primitive. Either way, the echo is very blurry and distracting, so I gave up part way into Lesson 2, and went back to the southern course.

It’s 1:40am here, and time I got some sleep. Goodnight, all.

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#74

Is there a thread in this forum on the funniest mistakes that people have made? Because I’m doing my daily Welsh practice session, and I have a contribution I could make to it.

Lesson 7:
@Iestyn: “Do you have meat?”
Me: “Wyt ti’n cig?”

I’m trying to imagine the look on the face of a Welsh butcher if I’d said that to him. :smile:

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#75

The response you get might not be what you are expecting either. I just imagined:

Cigydd: nagw, mae fe’n gweithio yn y dafarn

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#76

That is shocking. One hears of young people getting targeted by paedophiliacs, but it horrifies me to find that this sort of thing happens to adults. I didn’t particularly want to be clearly identified (hence ‘henddraig’) but I wasn’t nervous!!

#77

Oh yes, it does indeed happen.

I’m not nervous - just cautious. I find it astonishing just how much information people are prepared to put online about themselves. They may think as long as they don’t put too much information on any one site, they’re safe, but it is astonishingly easy to join the dots across websites and build up a very comprehensive picture of a person.

I’m into genealogy, and so is one of my brothers. When we couldn’t push our ancestry back any further, we started going sideways, to learn the names of our cousins. We’ve built up the most astonishingly complete profiles of distant cousins we’ve never met and who don’t know we exist - third, fourth, fifth, sixth cousins - entirely based on what they’ve voluntarily put online about themselves, across different websites. Mainly Facebook, but also company websites, universities, school newsletters, newspaper articles, special interest forums like this one…

My brother and I have no sinister motive - nothing other than curiosity about who our relatives are - but what if we did? What, say, if you mention on Facebook that you live in a certain village in Norfolk, you’re divorced, the kids have moved out of home, and you’re interested in the Welsh language, and then you post here in SSiW under your real name that you live in Norfolk and you’re off to Welsh Boot Camp soon? It ain’t rocket science for a prospective burglar to work out that your two accounts belong to one and the same person and that your house might just be empty for the duration. And then they only need to look up your address in the phone book. If your name is John Smith, you’re probably safe enough. You’ll be hard to pinpoint amongst all the other John Smiths. But if your name is more unusual, or your village is small enough, watch out.

It was understandable that people were naive back in the early ages of the internet. I worked in IT then, and even we IT folk, who were right at the centre of it, had no idea that everything we put online about ourselves would be forever there, forever retrievable, nor that search engines would become so very powerful.

But that was 25-odd years ago. People should know by now that the internet is forever, and if they don’t, they’re being very naive. Especially young people, who probably have more to lose by being too candid online. I’m old enough not to care a great deal any more what people think of me, but for a young person with a career in front of them, posting too much about themselves is taking a huge risk. I don’t like Facebook because of its insistence on real names (among other reasons). I don’t have a Facebook account, and never will.

Some say that we need real names to keep people polite. I disagree. Sure, you can hurl insults anonymously, but plenty of people post just as rudely under their real names. Likewise, you can be anonymous and polite. I have a personal rule: I’m sometimes blunt, but I don’t post anything I wouldn’t be prepared to say to a person’s face.

So I have no problem with pseudonyms. People can call themselves what they like. I’ll call you henddraig (I like that name, and I already know enough Welsh to know what it means!), and you can call me Matilda.

#78

Wow! This is a profound thread. I am a very occasional visitor to the forum nowadays but can sympathise with Matilda. I live in West Wales now but am Sais yn wreiddiol. I had several attempts at learning Welsh at local evening classes 10 - 15 years ago, heard a lot of grammar and had lists of words but but was never fired with enthusiasm and gave up.Then I heard about SSiW and joined in 2009 and gave up because of hearing problems, I was 75 then and totally deaf in one ear and a hearing aid in the other, A year later I came back, with the objective of stretching my brain. I found I preferred Iestyn’s voice to Aran’s and battled through the South courses and made amazing progress (well I think so). Having got some spoken Welsh I looked for other courses and eventually found Duolingo which widens your vocabulary and gives you a bit more grammar but has a shocker of a digital voice especially on low speed. Matilda will tear her hair at it.
Duolingo actually recommend SSiW in their notes for spoken Welsh.

Like a lot of others on this thread I say don’t get uptight about it, let it flow and enjoy it and amazingly it works out in the . Local Welsh speakers understand me although I don’t always understand them when they chatter away in local Cardi

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#79

Apologies for this very belated reply, @mikeellwood, but your post deserved a considered response rather than an off-the-cuff one, so I’ve been giving it some careful thought.

I have been listening to Radio Cymru, as per your suggestion. Still can’t pick out more than a word or two here and there, but I do find it helps give a sense of the “feel” of Welsh - its rhythm and pace and intonation. All languages have a kind of feel to them, in my opinion - some are sing-songy, some are clipped, some are bouncy, some are rat-a-tat like a machine gun, some are more palatal than others, some are more guttural, some are more liquid, some are more nasal - and the more one listens to a language, the more of that “feel” one unconsciously picks up, and the closer one gets to being able to reproduce the sounds and tones and rhythms like a native.

Yes, indeed. The IPA is one of the first things one learns in first year undergraduate linguistics - or at least, it was at my university. How to write it, how to read it, how to pronounce it, and how to hear it. (And we were tested on all four of those. We had aural and oral exams as well as written ones.)

No need to be afraid of it. The IPA is nothing more than a meta-language for discussing speech sounds. The reason it’s so big is that it needs to contain a symbol for every possible speech sound - and there are an awful lot of them, far more than any one language has. The IPA was developed because it’s essential for linguists to have a way of discussing speech sounds that isn’t language-dependent.

For instance, right here in this forum, if I talk about, say, “f”, we immediately have a problem: am I talking about the English “f”, or the Welsh “f”? To avoid confusion, I need to say something like “I’m talking about the English ‘f’, as in foxtrot”. Whereas if you and I were both linguists, I could just refer to the IPA symbol [f], and you’d know immediately I meant “f” for “foxtrot”. (Sorry, lovers of the Welsh language: IPA symbols [f] and [v] match the English pronunciation, not the Welsh one.)

The IPA looks scary because it contains so many symbols, but unless you’re studying for a phonetics exam, you don’t need to memorise them all. I used to have most of them memorised, especially when I had a phonetics exam looming, but as with anything that is use-it-or-lose-it, I’ve forgotten most of the symbols, and whenever I need to use them, I often need to look them up. So don’t worry if you can’t keep them all in your head. If you’re not sitting an exam any time soon, you don’t need to. Even professional linguists don’t remember them all, unless their field is phonetics or at the very least they’re researching the sounds of a particular language rather than some other aspect of it. Even then, they’ll probably only use the subset of IPA symbols that relate to the particular language(s) they’re interested in. And if their field is something like discourse analysis, where they’re not particularly interested in the sounds of speech, they may not remember any of the IPA at all.

It’s a bit like the periodic table in chemistry. If you use it every day, you probably have a lot of it committed to memory. If you don’t, you’ll forget it. I have a friend who was a high school chemistry teacher more than forty years ago. We go to quiz nights together, and occasionally there’ll be a question such as “Which element has an atomic number of 28?”, and I’ll pretend to be cross with him when he can’t remember. “How can you forget the periodic table? You used to teach it!”. He replies, quite reasonably, that if you don’t use it every day, you forget it. The IPA is the same.

If you want to become acquainted with the IPA, start with the symbols that are found in the language(s) you speak, such as English and Welsh. Learn just those symbols and the sounds they represent. Forget about the dozens of other symbols for now. Write your name in IPA symbols. Write your family members’ names. Write a poem, or a line or two you’ve just heard on the radio.

It is vitally important to write how the word sounds, not how it is spelled in English or Welsh or whatever. The spelling of a language (or orthography, to give it its proper name) is totally irrelevant. Suppose you’re writing the IPA for “Andrea”, for instance, and you’re up to the sound that follows the [n]. Some people would just write [d] without thinking. But is it really a [d]? Personally, I pronounce the “d” in “Andrea” with the same “j” sound as in “Juliet”, and in IPA, that’s written [d͡ʒ].

Moreover, the same word spoken by people speaking different dialects of a language may be written in very different IPA symbols. For instance, suppose I want to write the word “cup” as it is pronounced by a member of the royal family. I’d probably write it as… (oh gosh, this will test my memory of IPA vowels)… probably something like [kʌp]. If I were writing it as pronounced by a native of Manchester, it would be something like [kʊp]. If someone from Dublin, it would be pronounced much lower and further back in the mouth, and would be something like [qɒp].

When you’re comfortable with the IPA symbols that represent the sounds in your own language(s), if you’re still keen, then it’s time to expand your repertoire to the sounds of other languages. And there are some fascinating sounds out there. A whole group of click sounds. Another group of sounds that are called ingressives, which are made while breathing in rather than breathing out. (When I make these, I sound like I’m drowning.) Another group of sounds that are called ejective consonants, which I particularly like because they were such a challenge to master, and when I finally did, after eight weeks, it was a “By George, I think she’s got it!” moment. (And then the following day I said to my then three-year-old nephew “Hey, can you make this sound?”, and he copied me instantly and perfectly, the little swine. What took me eight weeks, he literally did in a second. Oh, to have the unselfconsciousness of a small child!)

That’s a difficult question. My own textbook was Peter Ladefoged’s A Course in Phonetics, but it’s fairly dry and theoretical and you’ll probably find it a tough slog without a tutor. In fact, I think you’ll find any phonetics textbook challenging without a tutor. It’s a subject that’s going to be very difficult to learn without being able to hear the sounds, so you’ll need a CD or an online audio resource at the very least, and even better, you need someone to teach you how to make the sounds and correct you if you get them wrong. Many speech sounds don’t come naturally. I remember reading Ladefoged’s description of how to make an ejective consonant (“Imagine you’re going to sing the lowest note you can. Now imagine you’re going to sing the highest note you can. Now move from one position to the other really fast”), and just not getting it. It took a very patient tutor and eight weeks of practice.

Trivial Fact 1: Did you see the film My Fair Lady? It’s Peter Ladefoged’s voice you can hear on Professor Henry Higgins’s gramophone, reciting the vowels. Ladefoged was the phonetics consultant on that film.

Trivial Fact 2: Peter Ladefoged taught phonetics to my linguistics tutor, who taught it to me. How does that song go? - I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales. :smile:

The most accessible introductory-level phonetics text I know of is Section IV of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by David Crystal (a Welshman! Yay!). In fact, I’d call that book the best introductory-level book on linguistics in general, that I know of. Crystal writes in a very clear and engaging style. But even with that book, you’ll struggle to learn the sounds of the IPA without some kind of auditory reference. You’ll probably need to do some searching online for that. Wikipedia is not a bad place to start - many of the IPA symbols there can be clicked on, and you’ll hear a voice making the sounds. How accurately, I cannot say - I’ve only clicked on a few.

I hope this has been helpful. I’ve probably gone too far off topic by now, and tried the patience of the moderators - this is a Welsh forum, after all, not a linguistics forum! - and it’s midnight here again, so I’ll call it a night.

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#81

I just thought I’d double-check that fact… and discovered that David Crystal was in fact born in Northern Ireland, and spent his teenage years in England!

But he spent his first ten or so years in Holyhead, where he learned Welsh as well as English. After that, he is quoted as saying, his family moved to Liverpool, “where Welsh wasn’t that much use! So, although I’ve kept up my Welsh, and now speak it reasonably well, and certainly understand it well enough, it’s not a daily language for me.”

I always think of him as Welsh, because he lives in Wales, he’s associated with the University of Bangor, and one of his main linguistic interests is revitalising and maintaining the Welsh language. So as far as I’m concerned, he’s a Welshman. :smile:

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