Talking to oneself is totally normal if you were an only child. Sometimes it is directed at the cat or one’s toys, but the habit of chatting when nobody else is there sticks! (Now it tends to be the TV or paper I talk to!) Language depends, Wenglish mainly!
I do that too. I also talk to my dog and cats in Welsh. If it is bonkers, then we are legion.
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Yes, but not out loud!
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I’m the youngest of 4, I regularly talked to myself, toys, the cat…it’s just normal behaviour for a child.
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And I think thats the bones of what SSiW is about, children learn in this instinctive way listen, repeat, play with learnt words, repeat, learn more, listen, play, repeat…
. I was talking to one of my children the other day who was having ‘I hate learning French’ moment and all they’ve had since the beginning of term in school is lists of words to learn. Not much room for creative and imaginative play with a list maybe?
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Exactly. I use memrise a lot to learn common words, but i then play around with them. Discovery is so much better than just being told. Hence the connection (cysylltiad) i made with ail and datblygu and then with cam and gor.
I try and incorporate various approaches. Memrise for new words (i don’t like making lists), radio cymru in the background, reading welsh threads on here, writing in welsh, a bit of welsh tv every now and again, Ssiw lessons still and speaking welsh in chat groups cafes etc.
Oh and talking to myself of course. 
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Yesterday I was reading an article which used the word ynglŷn several times - which I believe means “about, regarding, concerning”. The first time I saw it, I had to look it up. The next time I came across it, I had already forgotten the meaning and had to look it up again and it went on - the word was and is like teflon to me I just could not get it to stick. This morning I looked it up again. Today I realised it is almost always Ynglŷn â
I was thinking about this type of word and in this context it seems to be a word that in isolation has no strong tangible meaning. When you add an object it starts to make more sense and I wonder if some words can only really be learned through examples and building up a long term picture of the context in which they are used - Ynglŷn â’r mater - about the matter, referring to the matter. Also a word like this is not something I actually need at this stage for speaking, because I would probably incorrectly or not resort to “am” most times. Why say “ynglŷn â hynny”, when “am hynny” seems to say the same sort of thing most times or does it?
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I mentioned elsewhere that one of my early memories is of lying in my pram, looking up at the canopy (a light cotton affair with a fringe, put up in summer to shade my eyes) and learning how to say “Dada”. I still remember the feeling when I came out with “Dadadadadadada!” I didn’t know the words for triumph, success, achievement…but I know now what the feeling was! All of those things!
All my life I have been infamous for talking too much! But I agree, we must talk to learn to say!
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Thanks to SSiW I am well versed in talking to myself, or to beings who cannot respond/complain (i.e. my rabbits and very young son). I constantly try to narrate what I’m doing or going to do as practice. Sadly I do not know anybody in person who speaks Welsh (unlikely there are many in York!) nor do I have any time to voice/video chat (unless anybody want’s to exchange email or instant message, since my only free time is when the rest of my family is asleep ) so this and listening to the challenges on my commute to work are all I get! I think that the self-conversations are the glue which holds it all together! Actually an honorable mention - perhaps once a day I say something yn Gymraeg to a work colleague and wait for a Mitchell and Webb style response before repeating in English 
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Gilydd is another one. Kinda means given back or returned, reciprocal but if you ask people, it’s only ever really used in phrases like gyda’n gilydd.
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just found a nice expression with gilydd that is supposedly current. “bod (mynd) yng ngyddfau’i gilydd” at (going for) each other’s throats-attacking each other.
There are set occasions but gilydd doesn’t really fit into a sentence the way reciprocal would. There’s another phrase I can’t think of now, but they are set phrases, not easily broken and reformed. Kinda idioms I suppose
i imagine “at ei gilydd” is the next most common one after gyda’n gilydd". I seem to hear it on the radio a lot. (in the main)
I’m another one who talks to herself in Welsh (not aloud, though) and tries to translate everyday situations into Welsh even though there’s nobody around here to speak to who will understand what I say.
My vocabulary is still fairly limited compared to you all, and if I don’t know the Welsh word for something, no problem. I just shove the English word in its place, and think: one day, if I ever get fluent enough, I’ll be able to ditch the English words altogether.
I dream up imaginary conversations, and it’s made surprisingly easy by the fact that the vocabulary introduced in SSiW early on lends itself to a great many real life situations. For instance, I imagine one person saying to another in an office, in Welsh, “Have you finished that report? I need it”, and I imagine the second person replying “No, but I’m going to work late tonight. I’ll finish it and give it to you tomorrow.” Everything in the above dialogue apart from the words “that report” and “late” can be said entirely in Welsh after half a dozen SSiW lessons or so (from memory), and “late” is introduced not long after.
That’s fairly impressive after so few lessons. It’s a totally natural conversation, and beats the pants off the strained artificial conversations that you find in many other beginner language lessons. Forty years on, I can still remember laboriously translating “The boy sits down in the school” and similar artificial sentences in my early Chinese lessons. I have never in my life needed to say anything remotely similar to that sentence, in any language.
I’ll tell you something else I do to try and improve my Welsh, if you promise you won’t laugh. Promise?
I imagine myself standing in front of a group of people - my former colleagues, say - teaching them Welsh. They are complete novices, and I have to start from scratch with dw i’n, just as @Aran and @Iestyn did, introducing each new word or phrase or sentence structure and explaining how it fits in with what they already know, and then practising it with sample sentences before introducing the next one.
If at any point I stop and think - hang on, I don’t really understand this phrase or structure or whatever enough to teach it to someone else, or I know we’ve covered it already but I’ve forgotten it - then I know it’s something I have to give a bit more attention to in my own lessons.
I’m sure at this point, despite your promise, you’re all rolling around laughing at the very idea of a student (and a very beginning one at that!) imagining she’s a teacher of Welsh. Go on, then, laugh. I can take it. But as a method of reinforcing what I’m learning, I find it helps me.
It can be applied to a lot of subject areas, too. If you can’t explain a concept to an intelligent learner, you probably haven’t entirely understood it yourself.
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There’s a lot of very good research that suggests strongly that this is an excellent way to strengthen and improve the learning process… 
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I am totally sure, from personal experience, that the very best way of learning anything is to teach someone else!! In school, I taught a lot of others a lot of things, mainly maths and sciences. The next best way, is to try to explain to a complete novice why you can’t work out how to solve a problem! I dread to think the number of times I have said, “Well, you see Mam…oh! Now I see what o do!” On those occasions, she never understood a word and knew it didn’t matter! She was also a brilliant proof reader. She read aloud exactly what was in front of her and, at times, I’d yell, “No!” “That’s what it says, dear!” “Yes, but it shouldn’t!” Hastily correct! She rarely understood a word of my papers! Poor Mam!
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Thanks, @aran, that’s very reassuring. I was a tiny bit worried that you and @Iestyn might get all indignant and say, “The nerve, imagining yourself as a teacher after only a couple of dozen lessons! Don’t you know how many YEARS it took us to get good enough to teach Welsh?”
And I’d respond, pathetically, “I’m not really going to teach it. It’s only play-acting, and only in my head…”
Of course, @Iestyn hasn’t said anything yet, so perhaps he’s still working up a head of steam over my impertinence. And everyone else is probably having a laugh at my expense. But as I said, I can take it… 
More seriously, as I said in another post a few months ago, I was struggling badly with all the different forms of bydda for quite a while there (I will, you will, I won’t, you won’t, will you? and so on). I simply couldn’t see a pattern linking them - they were like random nonsense syllables strung together - and not seeing any pattern meant that I couldn’t remember each phrase from one lesson to the next.
What finally did the trick was that I broke each word down into its elements, figured out what the pattern was, and then the most important step: I imagined myself explaining it to a class of learners. I imagined myself saying something like this: “The core word for each of these phrases is bydda. If you can remember bydda, that’s the key to unlocking all the rest. But bydda only starts with [b] when it’s a positive statement. When it’s negative, or a question, the [b] softens to [f]. Now, immediately after the bydda bit, we have the pronoun indicating who we’re talking about - I, or you, or he, or she…and these various pronouns are as follows… and then if it’s negative, you drop in a ddim - the same ddim as in the previous sentences we’ve learned, do you remember?.. and finally you finish off the whole phrase with the particle yn, like a kind of capstone… but we’re not done yet. Because Welsh likes to squash its syllables together, especially when they start and end with vowels, the four syllables that make up the original elements in this phrase squash right down to two…” and so on.
Whether explanations such as this are strictly correct is neither here nor there. A Welsh grammarian could probably find lots of holes in what I’ve just said. The point is, they work, for me anyway, at this stage of my learning. I still sometimes have to pause before I remember what a particular phrase is, but I do get it in the end. Previously I was just drawing a complete blank, no matter how long I thought about it and how hard I tried to remember.
So, as silly as it might sound to some people, pretending to be a teacher is working for me. It helps me get the structures clear in my own mind, and it unquestionably is helping me remember them from one lesson to the next.
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I don’t think it sounds silly to anyone…
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I work (usually lol) as a maths teacher. Quite frequently i let classes work and just listen. I listen to how they help each other. If it works good. If not I intervene.
More often than not i try to get the students to suggest or tell me what they think they should do.
I rarely tell them.
My classes usually do very well.
So stick with it i say.
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At my work, we call this “playing dog”, as in “can you come over to my desk and play dog for me for a moment?”
The idea being that you explain what you’re stuck on as if you’re explaining it to your dog… not because the dog will (or needs to) understand, but the fact that you have to put your thoughts into explicit words makes you focus.
So just the fact that you’re teaching/explaining helps you to solve the problem.
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