SSiW is Rubbish, let's do better!

Who doesn’t love games? Of course turning language learning into a game will appeal to some and not others. Embrace all methods of learning. I like Duolingo for what it is. That goes for memrise too. If Ssiw had this kind of angle it would become more rounded. Because the former two apps don’t rely on speaking. SSIW does. What learners really need is to have a interaction with listening.

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You’re absolutely right. At first, I was sceptical of Duolingo and Memrise, but, after reading a lot of positive comments from people using them, I’ve decided to give them another go. They really are a helpful addition; I particularly like creating memes in Memrise to connect difficult words to pictures and mnemonics - and it works! Maybe I should start creating memes for the sentences in SSiW that just won’t stick :smile_cat:

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And if anything. These apps can be great vocab builders. Just make sure you double check with a mono language dictionary. Or a Google image search.

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I often end up saying “Ie … ydw” or “Na … nag oes” etc

What I like about Duolingo is that it helps me build vocabulary, but it in no way makes me feel I’m actually learning Welsh when I use it. SSiW is the hearty meal and Duolingo is the snack. :slight_smile:

See if you can turn it on in the Settings, right top corner, it should be there. I’ve even given the cute little owl a new outfit, “bought” with points earned from completing lessons.

Let me know if you ever want to have a skype chat in Dutch!

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Thanks. I will get back to it - one of these days!

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I’d wondered about the duration of individual lessons for a while and thought that shorter sessions might be easier to accommodate for many learners who may be able to fit two or more sessions into a day whereas one half hour session might be difficult. I seem to remember years ago that university research had shown that the optimal learning session was twenty minutes. Just a thought.

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I do half a lesson at a time, which I find ideal.
Aiming to complete at least one of these sessions most days works well for me.

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20 minutes is often given as the time after which attention will start to wander - and plenty of good thinkers have suggested ‘attention reclaiming’ devices every 20 minutes in lecture environments…

From what we’ve seen on intensives, though, it is possible to keep hammering away valuably at these exercises all day long, so there’s certainly no automatic cut-off at 20 minutes… which I think makes it more of a personal preference/situation kind of thing, and we do hope at some point to be able to offer a more flexible approach… :slight_smile:

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Cool. In the past I’ve added a custom dictionary to an English speech recognition engine to get it to recognise Welsh words. Very limited though, it could only take in known words that you’d added phonetically to the dictionary.

Multiple choice answers could do in the short term. I still think it’d be worthwhile.

Be good if it could test your understanding too, meaning you had to pick correctly yes or no, not just the correct form of yes/no. Maybe by showing you a picture and asking the question, e.g.

Shows picture of a white cat.
Audio asks; Ydy’r gath yn goch?
Choose;
Ydy
Oes
Na etc
5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

I’d say half an hour has to be the absolute minimum although it can be fairly stressing :slight_smile:
In general, other stuff that you go to, eg. Church meetings/services, conference sittings(?), gigs, etc, etc, need to be well over an hour to feel right. I’m not a fan of soundbite type magazine TV programmes for instance and used to love the longer documentaries.

A couple of things come to mind from my dim and distant past:
Day release was a 12hr college day;
Doubler car driving lessons: 2 hrs a go.
Self taught motorcycle training, say around 4hrs a go or perhaps a trip over the Pennines (read: Brecon Beacons/A470/Alps, depending on your location). :slight_smile:

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I hope that some day, I’ll be able to attend such an intensive or a bootcamp! :boot:

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Me too @Claudia_Beryan. Sounds terrifyingly marvellous!

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@Claudia_Beryan and @cat-1. They’re even better than they sound. You’d both love them and benefit enormously. :smile:

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I have a gym buddy that is a soldier, and, oh, man, working out with him feels like bootcamp! Obviously I have a thing for mercilessly hard work…(what the hell…come on, don’t play f :scream::anger_right: ing weak on me now, hear me?) Love it!

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I’ve been offline for a while and haven’t read all the comments - apols if I say something that’s already been suggested.

I got a fitbit a while ago and find the ‘little and often’ approach to getting active incredibly useful - like the way it reminds you once an hour to take 250 steps. I have wondered a few times whether something similar might work for language learning… e.g
features like a push notification getting you to take a little vocab quiz every hour, with the app keeping track of how many quizzes you’ve done per day, a daily score that you can try to improve on, challenges between friends, and maybe a graph keeping a running total of how many words you’ve learned.

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I have a number of apps under the Games section on my android phone and only two of them are in English (Classic Words and the Aston Villa app). All of the rest are in/for Welsh. Some of them are for children: Alun Yr Arth; Campau Cosmig and Dinas Emrys. Of these my favourite is Campau Cosmig, because there are six different space games to play, each with 10 different sets of vocabulary - clothes, sports, travel, food, etc. One of the games is a question and answer session, where you have to pick the correct yes and no. The questions appear on the screen and are read out, with the answer when you pick the correct one and the voices are very clear (little friendly aliens appear out of the craters on the planet and, if you are not quick enough clicking on the right answer, they disappear before popping back up again). The aim is to complete each mini game in as short a time as possible, because then you can bank the remaining seconds to use in a game when you collect as many planets or asteroids as you can. Keeps me amused anyway.

In terms of apps for adult learners, I have Memrise, Quizlet, Pablo and, most recently added, Flash Academy. I have used Memrise most, because I find it is handy to use for short periods or while doing something else, such as half watching television, or when someone else is in the room (playing on their phone/tablet too - like my mum!). Originally, I used it to extend my vocab, particularly for verbs, because I felt that I could slot those into any SSiW sentence as appropriate. I picked the courses that I knew (from experience or recommendation) were unlikely to contain mistakes.

I use Quizlet in a similar way, in that I only use the sets of words that have been put together from two sources: Popeth Cymraeg and Nic Dafis. I like the matching cards games, because that can be questions and answers (yes/no) or English/Welsh.

I put Pablo on my phone with the idea that I could record myself saying some of the sentences from SSiW or other sentences that I needed to learn, but I haven’t used it very much.

Finally, I recently came across Flash Academy, which I have quite enjoyed so far. I have only completed the first unit of each of the beginners, intermediate and advanced courses, plus one of the ‘speed word games’ at each level, because that’s what you can complete for free. From what I’ve seen it looks the most professional of the apps I’ve tried.

I did try Duolingo when Welsh first came out, but I was irritated by having to type everything precisely as they specify, so I gave up. I avoid that sort of thing on Quizlet too - if you don’t put the punctuation in exactly right, it says you’re wrong - that’s why I like matching pairs.

I’m not very competitive, so I don’t worry about leaderboards and I’m not fussed about putting streaks of days using the app together either. If I miss a day/week/month, then I have a good reason for doing something else.

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If you have 20 minutes, but chopping sessions into bits may be the only option if you don’t have 20 minutes available!

Fair comment.