A long and boring post with lots of questions + looking for a skype partner

I absolutely love it when they use “thee” and “thine” not on the stage. But I love the Yorkshire accent in general)

Thank you, very useful indeed!

Update on listening: I don’t know what sort of group enchantment have all you wonderful people here applied to me, but yesterday I decided to listen to Bore Cothi and at some point I realized that I understood almost every word of what they were saying. Very unexpected:) Thank you all very much, I will complain much more often if it’s going to work like this every time!

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I knew you understand much more then you actually are aware of! Da iawn ti! Dal ati nawr! :slight_smile:

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I totally agree with you that, like you, @seren is much better than she thinks!!
I nearly mentioned ‘mynynoedd’ in my posting, as it is a lovely example. Your posting covered that whole subject beautifully. One point occurs, I know that many people who are from Latin language countries or central Europe tend to ‘ee’ for ‘i’.
In Welsh, ‘i’ can be ‘ee’ as in Pontypridd!

Can’t ‘y’ and ‘u’ be ‘ee’ as well, at least in the South? In words such as llun (picture) or pryd (meal; when?), for example?

Wiktionary, at least, gives a pronunciation with [i:] for those words.

(In the north, of course, long ‘y’ and ‘u’ sound different from long ‘i’.)

GROVEL!! Mae ddrwg gen i!
You caught me in mid edit as I remembered ‘dyn’, for one example!! I had forgotten ‘u’, but we hadn’t been discussing that!
:sob:

I know I’m late to chime in, but I did want to say, not a boring post at all! For what it’s worth, my thoughts on accents are to concentrate on a single word (or words) that you may be struggling with and really play up the accent. As you get more comfortable with it, then dial it back a bit. When my children were younger (well, even now actually), I would sometimes talk to them in various accents, which they found quite amusing. Just play with it and have fun with it. I too am in need of more (any really) conversation yn Gymraeg, but I am on the west coast of the US, so -8 hours or more from most of you. I am also completely illiterate to how the whole Skype thing works, but I imagine it’s probably not that hard to figure out. Thanks Seren for starting such a great post.

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Thank you very much for your advice, I will try it! I would sometimes stop the Rownd a Rownd series and try to repeat the things they say imitating the accent:) Helps to learn useful collocations as well.
Timetable’s not a problem - I have an Australian and an American conversation partners, and I have a rather hectic schedule with gaps here and there, at different times, so if you would be willing to chat with me some time I could find a suitable time, I’m sure - and skype is really really easy to figure out. I’ve been teaching through it for ages.:slight_smile:
And skype does marvels, too - I’ve just had a Welsh/Italian conversation with @aran, and I can’t describe how happy I’m feeling - I could understand all of the things Aran said in Welsh and appparently what I said made sense, too:) Thank you very much, Aran! :sunny: It’s one of the rare moments when my perfectionism doesn’t make me feel less happy - though I understood I need to work on the relative clauses.

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I’m delighted to hear that - I thought you might be feeling sad that you know you can no longer post anything on the forum about your Welsh not being good enough, because you know I’ll step in and say ‘Ahem, actually, not true…’ :sunny:

You’ve clearly not got as much work ahead of you with relative clauses in Welsh as I have with those peculiar ones in Italian - and you sounded sad that they’re going out of fashion - I’m going to be hanging on waiting for them to die before I need to understand them…:wink:

Diolch o waelod calon, Stella - it was an absolute joy hearing that much Italian for the first time in so many years, and I was hugely surprised by how much of what you said I could follow - really, really delighted… :sunny:

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Touché:) I promise I will criticize myself only in a constructive way from now on - no more anobeithio’n llwyr!

Actually, you can speak Italian without “il congiuntivo” straight away - it has become a speaking norm not to use it at all, especially among younger people! In my city they hardly ever used it in their everyday life. Though some purists still frown upon it, but they are rare:)
I’m really really happy you enjoyed the Italian part of our conversation - and thank you because I haven’t spoken that much Italian for quite a while (not taking lessons into consideration) and it’s such a pleasure for me to pronounce those beautiful musical Italian words. Sometimes you need to take a break from speaking a language to go back to it and appreciate it!

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I KNEW! that conversation with @aran would do the same magic to you as it did to me! I’ve managed 4 and a half hours of almost only Cymraeg LIVE conversation today and all of this mostly because of Aran and then all the rest of you who wanted to chat with me in the past!

@seren now you go only up, up, up! You’ll see! No matter how it would seam to you you are not speaking good, you are and when you will start to feel that momentum is (maybe) fading and you’d think you don’t speak well, remember how much work you’ve put into all this and then you’ll remember just one thing: Aran didn’t speak with you for nothing, it was a reason, a special reason. When I tend to loose my momentum I always say to myself: “Hey, Aran spoke to you! This must be something special and you don’t want to throw that away, do you?” and I carry on … :slight_smile:

And I knew Aran can much more Italian then just listen … I don’t know how and why, but I just knew it!

So DAL ATI SEREN! You’re a star … don’t forget that!

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Thank you, Tatjana fach:)

Now that is so very cool I can’t even express my admiration:) Congratulations! :sunny:

Thank you. And i can’t even express how happy I am. I’ll write something about the whole thing later on, but I have to sort my thoughts first yet. If nothing drastically happens two more days lay ahead of me full of Cymraeg (and a bit of Saesneg as my husband and son will be with me aswell) … Yes, I have visit from Cymru, people! Will leave you in tension just a bit more who one is. :slight_smile:

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It was stronger than just enjoyment - I really am extremely grateful to you - and discovering that I could string some sentences together (a fair bit more than the first time I started making the effort with French last year) gave me a new sense of optimism for what I’ll be able to get done before I reach San Giacomo… :sunny:

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And I must say, Stella - it was immediately clear to me that you are going to be a very fluent Welsh speaker indeed - I’ll be extremely surprised if you haven’t done some television interviews by this time next year… :sunny:

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Thank you so much:) But I’ll be perfectly happy simply with speaking Welsh to Welsh people when and if ever I come to Cymru - and with promoting the language and the culture a bit here, if I can:)
And - I’m pretty sure your Italian will be understood even if you went to Italy right now - so it’s going to be really good in a few months’ time. (and in the meanwhile I will return to my Italian textbooks - our conversation made me want to polish my own Italian a bit)

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Stella - you are an incorrigible perfectionist - and that is one of the wonderful things about you. It’s nice to know I’m learning Russian from the best,

Justin

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That’s not entirely true - I’m as lazy as I’m striving for perfection. 90% of the time, when what I want is very hard to achieve and requires lots of patient everyday work, perfectionism loses the battle and retires with a “yeah, whatever”.

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Ooo, that sounds like me (thank you for quote of the day).

Cheers J.P.

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I knew someone would understand me:)

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