Aran, in today’s stream, you were considering removing the stuff about pubs. I want to give you some feedback about that change, as it’s one you already made in the new Welsh course.
First, some background about me: I am 48 and almost teetotal these days. I have a single drink on my birthday and one or at most two on Christmas day. I haven’t been to a pub or a bar even once since 2018 and I’ve probably been to a pub or bar 4 or 5 times in the last 12 years. The last time I actually got drunk was December 2014! I want to show you that pubs are really not my cup of tea to avoid misunderstandings regarding what I’m going to say below.
I really didn’t like that change in the Welsh course. Regardless of the fact that I don’t like alcohol much, talking about a “gwydraid neu ddau yn y dafarn” evoked connotations of socialising and conviviality that really helped make the other sentences around it feel so much more useful. The talk of water that replaced it didn’t sound social at all, let alone convivial. It sounded like rehydrating yourself on your own.
OK, I think I understand your (valid) reasons for the change. Some of your learners maybe have certain moral views about alcohol, others may be recovering alcoholics and yet others may belong to a religion that prohibits it. We don’t want any of these people to feel excluded, so by all means ditch the talk of pubs; but please don’t replace it with water.
Maybe you can talk about getting a coffee at the coffee shop or having a glass of cola at the party or something. Just something that evokes socializing and conviviality. Not water.
Congratulations on the halfway mark. You’re doing so well!
Personally, I have total faith that you’ll be able to express yourself just fine in your conversations, because I think your method works.
What I’m interested to see, though, is how much you can understand of what is said back to you. I know you really believe in these listening exercises and I’m very interested to see how that pans out!
I like the point about keeping it interactional, social - I think removing it (although I wasn’t hugely in favour at the time) is not a bad idea at all - but keeping the social elements is important (and I think we’re doing a lot of that in the new listening exercises).
I’m also pretty wary about how much I’m going to understand! I may just spend a week shouting SPORIYE at everyone
Well, even that shows progress, because I’ve watched the first 15 minutes and although it was tough, you were doing much better than the last time you complained about how brutal it was. Worth noting that this is in spite of the fact that today’s hour must have been objectively much harder than the previous time.
FWIW, I thought you were doing alright. It certainly didn’t seem like you were struggling. When I was doing the old Japanese course, I was happy to hit that kind of performance on a good day ha ha.
Finally, you’re running out of days now, so you kind of want the app to be brutal with you!
I’m definitely hearing audio on 41 [Oh, wait, did you mean today’s live stream?]
Yeah, it’s true - it’s super difficult to keep track of your own progress, really, unless you go back and listen to previous sessions (which I will do later on, I just don’t feel like the distraction at the moment, because I’m not on the verge of giving up!).
It’s also a really interesting insight that it’s much easier for other people to witness your progress than for you to witness it yourself - that explains why I’m so often in the position of telling people why they’re doing better than they realise, I think…
Oh, no - super weird - this seems to be another no sound day - but I’ve checked and my phone definitely wasn’t on ‘do not disturb’ this time. How frustrating! All my claims that it was a better session aren’t backed up by hard evidence
That was a tough session. Felt quite out of my depth most of the time. It’s going to be interesting to see how that sort of feeling ebbs and flows over the next week or so…
[Oh, wait, did you mean today’s live stream?]