I’d like to chime in with a few points. As someone who’s learned a good few languages now, I’ve realised that in order to get to higher levels of fluency in a language, there comes a point when you have to actually immerse yourself in the actual real life language, make it a part of yourself and your life, and live as much of your life through it as you can. It is not enough to rely on a language course to do all the work for you.
Of course, when we start out in a new language we have no, or very little, knowledge of that language and therefore we need one or more courses in order to teach us the grammatical structure and a core vocabulary so that we can get a foot into the door of the language. Then once we have this foundation, we can explore it deeper and integrate it more into our life, gradually building up more and more vocabulary, phrases and confidence with structures until we reach fluency.
In practical terms, that means that you need to focus on the 4 key language skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening. So that means reading books, articles, news etc, practicing speaking and writing with other Welsh speakers/learners, and listening to/watching as much content as you can (be that tv, radio, internet videos, podcasts, audio books, etc). All these things can be done even if you don’t live in Wales, thanks to the internet and the amazing digital technology we have access to these days.
SSI Welsh is truly brilliant - it absolutely does work, and it does take you to an excellent level and give you the structures and vocab you need in order to be able to live a lot of your everyday life through Welsh, but even the best language courses can only take you so far.
Of course, immersing yourself in the language in the ways I’ve suggested doesn’t mean you can’t still use language courses too. You absolutely can and should seek out and work through as many Welsh learning materials as you want to. All I’m saying is that studying a language with courses alone isn’t enough if you want to reach true fluency. If you want to reach that level where a language becomes part of you and you can use it effortlessly, you need to surround yourself with the real life language in addition to whatever courses you’re using.
You can still keep coming back to SSI Welsh in order to review and consolidate what it teaches you, as mastery of the basic structures of a language is the foundation your knowledge of it is built upon, i.e. go through the review lessons, read the attached vocab/structures lists with each challenge, and do the listening exercises. Then by immersing yourself in Welsh, you’ll see these structures and vocab come up in real life use and it’ll further consolidate everything into your memory.
In terms of learning more vocabulary, I’d like to recommend 2 courses that I feel are an excellent addition to SSI Welsh. The first is Linkword Welsh, and the other is ‘200 Words A Day Welsh’. Both these courses utilise the concept of mnemonics in order to quickly learn around 800 - 1000 everyday words (including memorising the genders of nouns, which is one thing that makes learning Welsh tricky). Couple this with SSI Welsh and you should have an amazing foot in the door to Welsh.
In terms of reading, if you haven’t already looked into it I’d like to suggest the bi-monthly Welsh learner’s magazine ‘Lingo Newydd’, available in print or as a digital version from the Golwg360 app. Every page also has audio of the text, spoken by a real Welsh speaker. I’ve only just started using it myself, and it’s proving an excellent resource to better my reading and listening comprehension skills in Welsh.
I’ve also started going through the old Welsh learning tv series, ‘Now You’re Talking’ - all the episodes are available free on Youtube, and it is another resource that compliments SSI Welsh very well I think. Finally, I also found the old SSI Welsh courses to be excellent too, so you might consider going through them in addition the the new challenges.
me too