Hi ran. I am a long time supported of SSIW because as I see it it is one of the best ways to getadults learning the language. I have been lazy due to covid (poor excuse) but have startedrevising in my ipod now and going toBore coffi twice a month. I kept up my oldsubscription of £3.68 a month even when not using SSIW but while it is only a small contribution will you increase my monthly patment to £10 please. Conrad
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Well do let us know when we can point SSiWers at it… 
@thomas-jones-1 superb! I have never yet bailed on any offers to share a pint in Caernarfon… 
And thank you very much indeed, really, for your very kind words.
Make it so! 
Or alternatively we can zoom, but real life is so much better, isn’t it?!
Oh, Conrad, that’s so very, very kind of you - you honestly don’t need to, we’re genuinely getting there and we’re delighted to be able to keep our longest supporters on the early payment levels - but I don’t want to be rude and ungrateful! If you’re absolutely sure, @Deborah-SSi will be able to help sort it out… 
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Hi,
I found your update SO interesting. I honestly had no idea it’s such a large and successful company. What an achievement !! I really love learning Welsh. I had none 13cmonths ago and was determined not to be the Englisn nan who didn’t at least try to talk to her son in law and grandsons in their own language. I’ve a long way to go ( Level 3, Challenge 8 ) until I sound anything like a local, but I am thrilled and proud of how far I’ve come and it’s thanks to you. Diolch yn fawr iawn, iawn !!! I just love it !!
Yeah, the pandemic, tkken its toll in so many and various ways. I hope your daughter’s anxiety subsides; bless her !!
I hope SSiW goes from strength to strength ( it certainly reads that way from your post!) I’m sorry for your doubts, but you got through it. The mindfulness of Buddhism will have helped. We try to run our lives along its lines too.
So take care and keeo on keeping on.
Anne
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Thank you for those lovely words, Anne! It doesn’t feel large and successful, to be honest - just about big enough to be a bit complicated… But we do hope that we’re close to getting somewhere with our English courses over the next year or so, and that could be the game-changer (and would let us bring a lot more resources to supporting Welsh learners) - so fingers crossed!
Interesting to hear that you’re paying attention to mindfulness and Buddhism - Thich Nhat Hanh has been an absolute life-saver for me, made a truly enormous difference. Thank you for your presence and your compassion 
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I note he’s been moonlighting on Y Golau, too…
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Tbh honest Aran my husband got " into it" years ago when working at Staffordshire Uni. We were invited to some events in Abbots Bromley where Buddhist monks live. So interesting!! I wouldn’t say we were Buddhist but live our lives along the principles and just kind of get on with it. It helped greatly when my work was beyond stressful and got me into understanding taking up and learning alternative therapies…life saver as you say!! There is I think a good balance to be struck between western and eastern thoughts and philosophies. These are thoughts from a caravan in the Chatsworth House parkland…pretty damn lovely !!
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Ah fab! Y Golau gyda Joanna Scanlan o Iaith Ar Daith! Seriously impressive speed learning. Huge props to her.
I’d’ve loved to have been seen for that show. One of these days… dwi’n dal ati!
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Seriously impressive - and I liked the show: marginally less dark than something like Craith, in the end. Spotted @aran on the credits as hyfforddwr iaith, IIRC.
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Oh, how fun - yes, I’m not quite sure about saying I’m Buddhist, but following the principles and finding the balance seems like a really valuable path…
Ia, dal ati ydi’r peth! Joanna worked really, really hard on her Welsh, and it was still a very challenging gig - I’m not sure if back-to-back is the future, I think we’ll get to a point before too much longer where it becomes about dubbing but with realistic AI lip movements. But I know Joanna is going to keep on working on her Welsh, it means so much to her.
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Wow to all the extra languages!
Have you ever considered doing the same for BSL? I’ve been looking for a course to do but all I can find are ones that will teach me words, rather than sentences. It could do with the ssiw approach.
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Yes, definitely given some thought to this - it’s more resource intensive for us to do that amount of video footage, but it’s something we’ll be looking at once we’ve improved the current course production process… 
I am relieved to see this message and that new content is being worked on.
Honestly, for the last few years, I have not been sure what I have been paying for every month - I don’t think I’ve learnt a new word of Welsh for some years now because, as far as I know, no new content has been released.
Or for any other language, for that matter.
(Yes, I know after finishing the “advanced content” on here (which I thought was going to be regular/weekly but randomly just stopped after a bit), I should now try and talk to others in Welsh more and do other things beyond SSiW, but I haven’t, and that’s totally my fault - but I don’t need to pay for an SSiW subscription to do that).
So I would also love to know what subscribers’ money has gone towards for the last few years, in terms of benefits to us, the subscribers, beyond paying for salaries for growing numbers of staff and making English-learning courses which seem to be “money spinners” designed to make yet more money, instead of using our money to provide direct benefits to us, the paying subscribers.
NB: I am not averse to people learning English, far from it, but I am averse to our money being used for the purpose of making “money spinner” courses for others, instead of providing benefits to subscribers - I don’t feel like I signed up to a crowdfunding / venture capitalist project but really just wanted personally to learn Welsh and other languages.
I hope this doesn’t come across as overly critical - it is meant in the spirit of enquiring and hopefully addressing the balance of priorities in the future.
So let me say that Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic would be really very welcome indeed and I am really looking forwards to these courses.
I would be very happy to pay subscription costs if they went towards this kind of thing - very happy indeed and possibly even ecstatic
I hope there will be some kind of advanced content or something going beyond the basics for these in the future too.
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Hi @Cymdraegwn - thank you very much indeed for those questions - I know it can be tougher to ask questions when you don’t feel positive about something than when you do, which makes such questions particularly valuable…
First up, we are still releasing new content - so that may just be a navigational thing - I thought we were producing 4 new pieces a month, but I’ve recently found out that it’s only been 2 or 3, so we’re going to address that in the very near future. We’ll also have some conversations about how best to present the material in ‘advanced’ so that it’s clearer what’s new. We’re going to be launching a new design for the website in the next couple of months or so, which I’m hoping will help.
In terms of what we’ve been spending on, I think that’s mostly covered in my first post - our biggest cost by far is salaries, and our main teams are support for existing learners, tech development, and production of new courses (we also have a couple of people working on partnerships and marketing).
The main channel for support for existing learners is our Slack community, where we host multiple group video practice sessions every week, which we believe are particularly high value to learners - you should have access to that as a subscriber - if you don’t, just drop admin@saysomethingin.com a line and they’ll get your access sorted out [tagging @Deborah-SSi for her to be aware in advance!].
Our tech development is also focused on learners’ needs, although it’s a longer cycle before the value becomes clear - we’ll be launching our new streaming approach in September, which allows people to learn for as much or as little time each session as they like, and also (crucially) to choose levels of difficulty for their learning (a bit like sets in schools). It will also have a built-in revision process for people who’ve worked through all the learning items, which I think will be very helpful even for advanced learners. It also provides the base for adding increasing amounts of personalisation to the process, which should mean that the percentage of people who achieve success with the course continues to rise - which is central to our primary goal of reversing language shift in Wales. The streaming approach is also what has made it possible for us to run pilot projects in schools, which is the other vital part of attempts to reverse language shift nationally.
The other main focus for our tech dev is the production of new courses - this is a complicated process, because we can’t just translate a static script (it breaks the method) - we’re getting better at the course production process (which is why we’ve been running the recent tests with several new languages) but we still have a lot of room for improvement, which is going to be one of our main targets for next year. Our goal is to be able to produce new courses quickly and cheaply enough (while maintaining consistent quality) for us to be able to produce a course for every remaining language.
All of these lines of work would be going a lot more quickly if we could afford more staff - and that’s the aim of the English courses. It also happens that the process of translating an interface language (to build more English-for-x-speakers courses) is currently faster than the process of building a course for a new language - so existing demand and our capacity to supply fit very well here.
We’re predicting that it’s the income from English courses that will make it possible for us to build extremely high quality, personalised video courses for all other languages (including making it possible to learn Welsh through the medium of lots of other languages), to keep developing tech that is high value for learners (I’m keen for us to build for a peer-to-peer social layer that helps arrange access to tutors as well as partner/group learning) and to invest more in advanced content - we’ve had some interesting conversations with S4C recently in that direction.
So right now, the value for you as an advanced subscriber is in the advanced content and the access to video group practice sessions, and if you’re not finding those (or not finding them helpful) then I would sincerely encourage you to stop your subscription - we certainly don’t want you to feel under pressure to continue to subscribe!
Having said that, the income we get from subscriptions is very much going towards projects which I think are going to benefit all Welsh learners - by increasing the number of learners, increasing the number of learners who don’t have English as a lingua franca, increasing the efficiency of the learning process (so increasing the number of successful learners), increasing social opportunities to use the language and (although more gradually) increasing the amount of content for advanced learners…
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Just to say thank you so much for your reply - it means a lot.
So long as I can be absolutely sure that new courses are being worked on, I am happy to continue my subscription and hope to take them as soon as they are released.
I’m surprised there has been new content - perhaps some threads like the “Published: new advanced content” thread on this forum could do with being updated to reflect / point that out - that would be appreciated.
I understand that paying salaries of so many staff for many years costs a lot - I just wasn’t sure what those staff had actually been working on for all that time, but I can see that at least some things are in the works.
So thank you again for the reply - I’m a lot more positive than I was before and hoping to get back to language-learning asap, Welsh and beyond!
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Hi Aran
Sorry I missed this thread, but great that the update summary flagged it up by email.
So pleased that You (we) have pulled through in these tough times, and that you have responded well to the challenges that have presented themselves.
Onwards and upwards!
Love to you All.
John.
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You’re hugely welcome, and thank you very much for your support, which really does mean an enormous amount to us - and thank you for being willing to ask the questions!
Yes, we’ve definitely got some ‘swan above the water’ vs ‘swan underneath the water’ stuff going on - we’re always pretty flat out, but it’s not always obvious to us what isn’t clear from the outside! And tech dev in particularly always takes longer than you hope
@CatrinLliarJones is leading on advanced content now, so we’re going to get to a regular 4x month publishing schedule, and we’ll make sure that updates are easier to see on the website, and are flagged up every time in here - thank you for that suggestion
Diolch yn fawr iawn, John! Really appreciate your kind words - yes, pressing on, and stronger for the experience
Thanks so much - really looking forwards to getting back into advanced material regularly soon
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Thank you Aran for taking the time to explain all that - I had no idea there was so much going on behind the scenes, and no wonder that with that + pandemic + supporting your daughter, it has all felt overwhelming at times. As the parent of a neurodiverse child who is no longer in school, I know how much mental and emotional space is needed to support them and deal with all the stuff that comes with it, and I’m honestly in awe that the two of you are doing so much! But please do put your own wellbeing high on the list too. Excited to hear about Scottish and Irish Gaelic being in the pipeline. I just have one question - you talked about the new system of streaming but how will it work exactly?
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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.
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That’s very lovely of you, Ruth, thank you so much
Streaming - we’re calling it AutoMagic - will make the whole process much more straightforward. You log in, hit play, stop when you feel like it - it will always remember where you’d got to and what you need next. You’ll be able to choose difficulty levels - getting more time to answer and shorter sentences and more repetition depending on the setting - and then over time we’re going to add more and more ways for us to understand how the learner is doing, and help adapt the flow to suit their needs (that’s a big project, which is going to take a while - we’ll probably do some fun gamification stuff first).
I’m really hoping it’s going to make a dramatic difference to how many people achieve success with the course 
That sounds like a terrific attitude, Chris! Good luck, welcome to the forum, and do let us know how it all goes
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