There will be a bootcamp in Tresaith from 22 - 29 July
I will be opening booking when we have enough interest shown here, so make yourselves knows. The April bootcamp sold out in a little less than 24 hours once booking was open, so make sure that you are on the list here to get notification of when the bookings will open.
Iâd love to attend a July boot camp please! I canât. Normally make the dates because of work, but this one just falls in the school holidays so Iâd love to come!
Iâm definitely interested in knowing when reservations will be open! Iâll be in Wales from June 15th to sometime in August, so Iâm on the lookout for as many bootcamps/classes/etc as I can afford and fit into my schedule!
This is my first post in SSiW. I am Eckhard from Hamburg in Germany, aged 52, trying to start to learn Welsh. Iâm in challenge number 9 of the first northern level.
I have read somewhere that âhaving completed Course 1â is enough Welsh for the bootcamp. What puzzles me is whether âcourse 1â and âlevel 1â are the same. I am currently learning Level 1 from the SSiW website, and there are no such âvocabsâ as there are for the courses.
So, I am absolutely not sure (dw i ddim yn siĆ”r :-)) whether the boot camp in July would be suitable. Iâm afraid to not understand or be able to say anything. Everybody seems to be âbetterâ than I am.
But, nevertheless, Iâd be interested to attend the bootcamp (shiver). Provided I manage to complete the first level. Would that suffice?
Level 1 is a later version of the methodology - and the key vocab work for the bootcamps has been built into it, so if youâve completed Level 1, youâre eligible for Bootcamp without any further work (although the further you can get through Level 2, the more youâll enjoy it!).
It would be very interesting to hear what got you interested in learning WelshâŠ
@eckhard. I can promise you that EVERYONE feels that EVERYONE else is better than they are at sometime or another.
And it is true. As a frequent flyer in bootcamp, though not for a while, Level 1, or Course 1 plus vocab units, is enough to get you through bootcamp. Possibly with the odd headache and âWhy on earth did I sign up for this?â moment added in. Iâm told the judicious addition of alcohol helps as well, but as a teetotaler I canât swear to that part of the mixture.
So, if you are waiting for someone to tell you that you can go to bootcamp, Iâm telling you that,
If you have completed level 1/Course 1 (you donât need to have done it now, just by the time you get to bootcamp)
and can commit to only speaking Welsh for a week
and can live with the odd âWhat on earth am I doing here?â moment
Hello @eckhard and welcome to the forum first. I can relate to what youâve written here almost in total but, being on the bootcamp last year (although with a bit more of material made but with the same wonderings) I can assure you youâll do just fine. The main thing is to go there as youâd go on a holieay with brilliant addition of being able to speak just Welsh wherever you go and to be able to learn huge amount of language which youâll be aware youâve learnt only when youâll be already home for a week or so after the bootcamp.
If at the beginning of the bootcamp youâd maybe have the terrible wish to be alowed to speak some English (which is strictly not allowed though if you want to get the most of the bootcamp) then at the end of the bootcamp youâll have kind of âpost bootcamp syndromeâ because you just wonât be able to switch back to English entirely.
I even now many times am tempted to speak Welsh rather then any other language, even my own one, at some occassions.
Take bootcamp as a holicays and fun and youâll do just fine with it. It is really as @margaretnock and @aran are saying - youâd be better to finish Level 1 until then and donât worry about mistakes. Here at SSi making mistakes is almost as a non-written rule as youâll learn a lot from them. Youâll forget to make one kind of mistakes and go further to another type of them but this is all a process of learning what, when you get into accordance with them, can be great fun!
Thatâs 9, maybe ten, so it definitely looks like this one will run - I always enjoy the July bootcamp!
There wonât be anything happening here nest week (itâs half term, and Iâll have too many kids here to be able to think of anything else!), but keep your eyes peeled on the following week.
Ooo, so many replies! Thank you very much and sorry for not having answered earlier.
To @aran: Thank you very much! My wife has been in Bangor as a medical student many years ago, thatâs why we payed a visit in October 2013, together with our daughter. I became curious about the language when I read the word âcwrwâ somewhere. For a German, this seems impossible to pronounce, as âwâ is spoken like the English âvâ, so in English it would be âcvrvâ. In the small village of Dolgellau I happened to buy two small books, âWelsh for beginnersâ and âStreet Welshâ. But I never managed to actually read them seriously. Only two weeks ago I came across them, got curious again and finally found SSiW. That is, basically, what got me interested in âtrio dysgu Cymraegâ (stress on âtrioâ).
By the way: Is it you, Aran, who speaks in the challenges? I enjoy them very much, and today I had to laugh about the way you say âdw i ddim isio dysgy mwyâ in challenge 10. Very funny indeed.
And to @margaretnock: Thank you for your encouraging words. Although, itâs not that I wouldnât want to commit myself to only speaking Welsh, but rather that Iâm afraid not to be able to. But encouragement helps, I think.
And to @tatjana: Thank you, too! Holiday is a nice imagination, you mean Iâd better bring my sunglasses? What you wrote sounds like bootcamping should be worth a try.
Ooo, ye ⊠if weather manages to be sunny all the day at least for 2 or 3 days, then you should definately bring sunglasses with. But most of the time youâd actually wonât need them - haha! If youâre acustomed to sea temperatures about 15 or 20 degees C and youâre bold enough to swim in 15 degrees then you should bring your swimsuit too, otherwise you should leave it at home.
All the rest is holidays ⊠trrying to speak, speaking, going around with the group trying all sorts of things from singing to visiting interesting places ⊠playing some games at the evening and of course! going to tafarn where youâd probably drink cwrw. Even I claiming all the time I donât drink any alcohol (and I in fact almost donât drink it normally), went there gladly, talking to other bootcampers and natives if occassion provided that moment, all with nice peint of cwrw of course.
Yes, @eckhard, it is holidays and it is fun and it by all means worths going.
Well, bring sunglasses with, just in case, you never know âŠ