[Now fully booked] next northern Bootcamp - 2017 - dates, waiting list

Welsh Bootcamp
#1

Good heavens - is this an unexpected flash of organisation?!

Catrin and I are in something of a state of chaos at the moment with bedding down in our new home - as you may have noticed! - but wonder of wonders, we’ve managed to make some decisions about the next northern Bootcamp.

It’s going to be slap bang in the middle of Caernarfon - which opens up some fascinating possibilities (not all of which are pubs).

This is where we’ll be staying:

It will kick off on Friday 21st of April, running until Friday the 28th of April - and the more eagle-eyed of you might have noticed that is just before the SSiW 8th Birthday Party in Caernarfon on Saturday the 29th of April… :slight_smile:

So here’s what we’re thinking - we’ll move along fairly promptly with setting up booking for the Bootcamp, and we’ll guarantee that everyone who gets a place will have a ticket kept for them for the birthday party (if they want).

It will mean figuring out local accommodation for the Friday and Saturday nights yourselves - the Bootcamp house only offers Friday to Friday - but there are plenty of options there.

It will cost £350 per person, and will be limited to 10 people.

I will post the booking link:

…in this thread and on Facebook next Friday - a week tomorrow - at 9 pm GMT. That gives us time to let everyone know via the email next Tuesday (@Deborah-SSi please!), and it doesn’t force people in America to get up offensively early, and it doesn’t put our Australian learners at a crippling disadvantage.

[It just means I have to set plenty of reminder alerts to myself to interrupt ‘movie night’…;-)]

As usual, we must emphasise that we can only offer refunds if we are forced to cancel it ourselves - so if you think there is any reason you might book and then need to miss it, please, please take out travel insurance. :slight_smile:

Looking forward to seeing what kind of a motley crew we get to sample Caernarfon with next Spring (if we haven’t actually died of cold over the winter, of course…;-)).

For those of you who haven’t done Bootcamp before, please be aware of two key points:

1 - You MUST have completed either Course 1 and the vocabs, or Level 1. This is to make sure you have enough Welsh to be able to get the full benefits of the experience. And if you’ve gone further than that, even better.

2 - There is NO switching back to English (or other languages!) on Bootcamp. That is the fundamental rule. If you don’t think you can manage a week without English, please don’t book - because using English won’t just damage your learning process, it will damage the process for everyone else as well. We are super serious about this - despite my usually light-hearted tone, this is NOT a joke…

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#2

Grrrrrrrr. what a coincidence, yesterday i booked those dates away with my mother.
Have fun.

Cheers J.P.

#3

Ouch - sorry, John! But if you’re going past on the way to Cricieth you’d be welcome to call in for a panad… :slight_smile:

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#4

Hmmm… I might actually be able to come (if I get a place, of course) :astonished:

How much much money should I expect to spend during bootcamp? Would I pay for food myself? I’ve read some of the old bootcamp threads but I’m not sure :smiley:

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#5

Yes - it depends a bit on the group - sometimes everyone chips in and one pair of people cook each evening - sometimes everyone feels they’d rather just do their own self-catering - and we tend to grab lunch out somewhere (although that might be a little different in a town centre).

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#6

Okay, thank you! :smile:

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#7

Now I would so love to do this, having made an executive decision that my kids are now old enough to cope with dad and grandparents for a week. (Apart from the fact that the timing is unfortunate, just after going to Germany for Easter - and my birthday happens to be in that week - but I will still have a go at negotiating it with the rest of the family…)

Question is, will there be any kind of selection / bribery process, or is it fingers on the button? What will happen if you get 40 people who all apply at 9pm on Friday?

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#8

Something will probably explode!

It’s my understanding that the software will take the first ten, even if it has to differentiate in microseconds…:wink:

The truth of it is, we don’t usually expect it to sell out for at least five or six minutes.

[We’ve tried selection processes in the past, and it just opens up a gigantic can of worms! And I’ve just run an application-based process for our first 5 day intensive, and it was a real headache ploughing through them all…]

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#9

Fair enough, can imagine that!

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#10

Just occurred to me - in case anyone from last year is still wincing - this is going to be a ‘traditional’ Bootcamp, all fun and games and no hard-working mornings…:wink:

The hard-working stuff has splintered off in the direction of the 5 day intensives (you’ll probably be glad to hear!)… :slight_smile:

#11

That’s both good and bad news, the work really was good and , I think, brought everyone along but it really was a chore. I really, really, really think I’ll be missing out on this one, I think 4 bootcamps is enough. It looks like a good one though.
If anyone has any questions on how the northern bootcamps work just tag me in and i’ll answer as honestly as I can. Enjoy.

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#12

I’ve received a PM to ask about the previous northern bootcamps so I thought I’d copy my answer here for anyone else considering going. Have a look at the threads for the previous 4 northern bootcamps and you’ll find accounts of each week in various degrees of detail.

The week usually entails daily trips out and about to experience life through Welsh. In the north we have always catered for ourselves after buying food from local shops and supermarkets but with regular visits to cafes and restaurants thrown in. I can imagine that, seeing as this is a more urban location, this Caernarfon bootcamp may involve a few more nights out. You can make it as cheap or as extravagant as your budget dictates.

The place where the previous bootcamps have taken place has a fully stocked kitchen (not food) with everything you need as well as bedding and towels, I hope @aran or @CatrinLliarJones can confirm that this is the case this year. You just need to pack clothes, toiletries and any personal medication (and ear plugs in case you share with a snorer … I speak from experience, don’t I @vgh50?).

If you haven’t been on a bootcamp before you’ll need to know that they are an intense, tiring, emotional roller coaster of a week but something that will change you as a person, will leapfrog your spoken Welsh ability forward more than you would have thought possible, you will make lifelong friends and you will see Wales from a whole new and exciting angle. I can’t recommend this enough, after all, I did one and went back again three more times.

If you can trawl through this you are doing well.

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#13

Heyyyy!! :astonished: OK :flushed: digon teg, fair enough. :smirk:

Of course, the wise man with the beard is absolutely right, I’ve been to two Northern bootcamps and apart from meeting and spending time with a load of amazing and wonderful people, to experience Welsh Wales through the eyes of a Welsh speaker (that will be you, trust me) is something so special and life changing, you simply have to experience it for yourself :slight_smile:

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#14

Can I ask a question? I’ve done course 1, level 1 and am now on challenge 14 of level 2. However, whenever I try to speak to anyone in Welsh, my brain seizes after the initial introduction and even if I understand them, I just can’t think quick enough to reply. I’d really like to come on a bootcamp but am really worried that I will just not cope. What do you think?

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#15

You will cope. It’s designed to convince you that you can cope. You will be stressed. But you will cope. Go for it.

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#16

It sounds like you are the perfect bootcamp vict, er, I mean candidate. You are the type that will get the most out of it. Seriously, it will scare you, shock you, surprise you and change your life … all in one week, and all while having a whale of a time and making new friends. Like Margaret said … Go for it.

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#17

This does actually sound, as the others have said, as though a Bootcamp is exactly what you need right now - the time to go through that process over and over again until you break through… :slight_smile:

But if you come, spend the whole week in Zen silence, and feel it was a failure for you, we’ll refund you… :slight_smile:

#18

I feel nervous already!

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#19

Understandable, but it won’t be as bad as you expect, and it will probably be a lot better than you expect. If you haven’t already tried it, it would be good to try to find a Skype partner or two. Just take it slowly, short sessions at a time, by mutual agreement. If you don’t quite feel up to spontaneous conversation yet, you could try going through part of one of the lessons or challenges together. It almost doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you can get some Welsh flowing one way or another. Fill in with English words if you have to (it’s not bootcamp yet! :slight_smile: ) to keep the flow going. It will get you used to speaking with someone else listening, which is usually not the case with the lessons/challenges, and that in itself is a big step forward in my opinion, even if it isn’t yet spontaneous conversation.

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#20

That’s fine; I was before my first bootcamp too. The first couple of days are often quite tough (I ended up blurting things out in English without meaning to a few times - it’s easily done when you speak without thinking, and I have been known to do that on occasion ;). I would definitely suggest not trying to translate stuff while you hear it - if you don’t understand when it’s spoken, you can always ask someone to repeat, and the time spent trying to translate means that you miss what comes next. Listening to the listening practices (speaking of which, any timeframe for the Level 2 ones, @aran?) between now and bootcamp will help enormously, and the Course 1 Vocab lessons contains some useful stuff that isn’t yet in the newer material.

What I found helped me was trying to make my internal monologue Welsh. It’s easier to restrict yourself to speaking Welsh (and, in fact, to a more limited vocabulary) when those are the only words rattling around inside your head - and it’s also easier to understand other people speaking Welsh when that’s the language you’re thinking with.

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