I’ve wound up following Gareth! on Twitter…
Gareth is great - one of the funniest innovations on S4C in years. He’s part of the ‘yoof’ strand that includes the music show Ochr 1, the magazine show Y Lle, and the successor to the latter, Hansh. The interesting thing is that Hansh is not just a TV show, but a cross-media phenomenon where items may appear first on any of YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or television and are then networked around the other media. It’s all a bit difficult to keep up with if you’re only used to a single-medium-with-spinoffs approach to popular culture.
Anyhow, here’s the TV version: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p054nwtd/hansh-cyfres-2017-pennod-1
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Happens all the time! Have a great conversation one day and then next time can’t understand a thing. I find it helps if I start the conversation about things that I know the welsh for, also some people are good at speaking to learners and will let you take the lead enabling you to go wher you want with the chat, even if it means ending up by saying " I’ve never seen an old cat falling down stairs, which is what I talked about in one of my first ever conversations. !! Couple of drinks help!
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I had the same experience watching a TV programme recently, when the interviewer was speaking to some farmers in Gaerwen livestock market, asking if they were satisfied with the prices their beasts were realising. I could hardly understand a word they said! I don’t think it was the accent - Ynys Mon is fairly mainstream - but they seemed to be dropping the beginnings of words, omitting many consonants and sometimes running words together. Not a lot different, I suppose, from what you’ll hear in a market here in Suffolk,
I recall a similar problem with lock-keepers on the Canal du Midi, in Southern France. The language they spoke bore no resemblance to the French I’d learned in school.
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Broad Suffolk: now you’re talking 
I once spent a few minutes listening to some fishermen talking on Sizewell Beach and can honestly say that I didn’t understand a word.
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I was thinking about this today. Could the difference between understanding and not be down to a large element of familiarity? The longer you’ve spoken the language the greater your familiarity with the ‘norm’, therefore, the greater our understanding of variation.
So we recognise the word that has been altered because we’d be familiar with the context and more standard usage. Gradually as we hear more and more Welsh we’ll be more and more familiar so our guess work will get better. I’m fairly certain that I don’t hear a lot of things but can guess because I’ve spoken English for the best part of 30 years. In other words, my life is largely guess work 
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I tend to guess what the other person has said a lot of the time too and reply to what I hope they said . I’m sure I get it wrong half the time 
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In Welsh, English or both? 
My replies are definitely educated guess work. But hey, embracing our mistakes is at the core of improving so we’re on the right track
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I hope that this is the correct thread.
I’m getting more comfortable with Radio Cymru now, but still finding “the wild” to be lagging a bit.
I was with a friend this morning, when a 2nd friend turned up and said something as he passed by. To be honest I didn’t catch it until he had already passed us, so I just smiled “knowingly”.
I think in hindsight, he said “peid a wneid e” for “don’t do it”. OK, so it seemed a bit of a random thing to come out with, but that’s friends for you. To be fair, the other friend also just smiled, even though they are both first language speakers.
Hopefully, I’ll be better prepared for some similar pleasantry, next time.
You weren’t, say, leaning on the parapet of a bridge at the time, were you?
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sometimes i want to say i haven’t got the foggiest idea what you just said
be nice to say that in welsh so I trawled fhe depths of amazing things to use on GPC and came up with the quite ridiculously trying to be far too oversmart following.
what about?
weithiau dw i moyn gweud ni wn i ar glawr daear be ti newydd gweud ond ni wn i naws
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Personally, I’d be slightly less adventurous and go for something like:
Weithiau sai’n gybod beth ti’n dweud.
for - Sometimes I dont know what you are saying.
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and me - in the real world - but no harm in imagining saying something really clyfar
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