It’s been a long old wait, and involved a huge amount of sometimes frantic work behind the scenes, but we are now within touching distance of publishing the first couple of lessons for Level 3 - and that means the new system is up and running, so the next set of lessons will come fairly hot on their heels (I’m anticipating two or three weeks between new publications).
Now, there’s one thing about Level 3 which will probably catch your eye/ear, and seem a little odd - I think we can fine-tune it, but it’s complicated.
And that’s the nature of the units that get presented - the ‘So, the Welsh for [x] is’ kind of stuff.
It’s turned out, at this stage of the SSiBorg, that it’s tricky to get those to come out in exactly the same way as I’d choose if I was doing them manually.
So some of them will sound odd - like ‘that he is’, for example, or ‘as though you’, that sort of oddly incomplete kind of phrase.
But - don’t panic! - you’ll immediately get the chance to hear and use them in the kind of fuller combinations that will make much more sense, and the material we’re going to be covering should (fingers crossed!) do a good job in general of stretching you a long way beyond the usage patterns that you’ve got going at the moment.
I will, of course, be PARTICULARLY interested in your feedback at this early stage.
For the first time on the Welsh course, the material you’re getting will have come through the SSiBorg - our automation+human course creation tool - and that means that some elements of it will be much easier to fix/re-publish than was true of previous courses.
And feedback you give now will have a direct impact on the SSiBorg itself - so not just the Welsh course, but everything else we publish from here on in.
Thank you very much indeed to those of you who have been waiting gracefully and patiently for this - your support has meant the world to us.
Thank you also to Ifan @Kinetic - who has laboured long and hard to understand some of the less obvious ways in which my mind works, and to make things I want to happen come true, and to point out why I should try not to want some things. He’s built a unique piece of software which I believe gives us a real launchpad.
Thanks also to Jeff @lewie - who built a level-checking piece of code for the SSiBorg which gives us an entirely new level of confidence that you’ll never have to go from ‘FAR TOO LOUD’ to ‘can’t hear you now’ any more - which is going to be massively important as we start working with a wider range of volunteers using a wider range of recording devices.
And thank you, o waelod calon, to @CatrinLliarJones for sitting out in a freezing cold ‘sun room’ to record her beautiful voice for us, in the midst of trying to juggle eighteen other urgent things all at once.
Oh, how soon is VERY soon?
Well, put it like this, I think a computer or a piece of code somewhere will actually have to CATCH FIRE to stop us from putting this out tomorrow… 
