Hi, Aran - I thought I’d reply here as I can’t work out how to post anything on the thread linked to in the email (Croeso! Welcome to 1 sentence in Welsh - how is it going for you?), so hope this is OK!
I’m English and have lived in England almost my whole life, except for a one-year university placement when I worked in Cwmbrân in 1980/1. I went to evening classes in Welsh out of interest, loved the language, and even found an evening class that I could go to for a couple of years when I returned to Bristol a year later. I’m a tutor on a distance-learning course in cultural astronomy and astrology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, nominally based in Lampeter, but because it’s almost entirely online I rarely get to visit the campus. I was there last week to run a Summer School and for graduation, and got the chance to practice my very rusty Welsh a little bit.
My motivation for doing this course is that even when I lived in Wales and had some Welsh-speaking friends, I couldn’t never get out of the habit of thinking in English and painstakingly translating into Welsh in my head. It also meant I could speak Welsh better than I could understand it! I could construct sentences using vocabulary I knew, but that didn’t mean I knew all the words in the reply the person gave to me, and because I was translating in my head what they replied word by word, I got lost easily. “Croesi’r bont”, my friends called that magical skill of being able to think and speak in Welsh without translating into English in my head!
It’s hard to say at this point whether SSi will be useful for me based just on the first five sentences, because I was already familiar with the vocabulary used (except although I learned in South Wales, I had no idea Cymraeg was pronounced “Cum-rahg” there - I’d always been taught that it’s “Cum-r-eye-g”, but maybe that’s because Cymraeg Byw was the standard method in the 1980s, trying to teach a sort of “universal Welsh”).
Going to Lampeter and getting to try out my Welsh has made me very eager to improve it, and - who knows - maybe even achieve some level of fluency at some point, so I’m keen to sign up for the SSi course and give it my best shot!
Chris.