Maybe ‘tasai (or ‘sai’) hynna ond yn gywir’ would sound marginally more everydayish 
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Well hurrah for that – I’d just decided hynna sounded better 2 seconds after hitting Reply
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And I heard (not for the first time) “y peth iw…” (or it might have been “y peth ydy…”) on S4C very recently. I think we’d been discussing this (and whether it was “real Welsh”) in Oxford not so long ago.
Well, there may be a more Welsh idiomatic way of saying “The thing is…”, but apparently at least some natural Welsh speakers use this one.
Y peth yw/ydy is something you hear a lot from politicians and other public figures trying to get their point across on broadcast news. It’s very common.
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aka completely ignoring the actual question… 
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“Wel, gadewch i mi dweud yn gyntaf bo’ fi’n falch iawn iawn bo’ chi 'di gofyn hynna, ac…”
(Is that about right? “First let me say that I’m very glad indeed that you’ve asked me that, and…”)
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One thing many Welsh speakers of my parents generation and their parents were often accused of, was speaking “pidgin” Welsh, something which couldn’t be more inaccurate as a term goes. “Pidgen” is supposed to refer to a simplified language that people use to communicate, associated with second language speakers - insulting as it is to second language speakers, applying it to first language speakers was really inappropriate.
Oh I know. I was out last night and once the last ‘English speaker’ left and I was suddenly thrust into conversation in Welsh. I understood the gist, but it was the vocab that let me down. My grasp of how Welsh works is reasonably okay, thanks to SSiW of course and I have been picking up a fair old amount of vocab, but when speaking to fluent speakers or listening to radio or television there are so many words I don’t yet know and it is still frustrating. It often seems like there’s never enough vocab.
Indeed.
1/ it’s when i know the more Welsh word for something and I don’t want to lose that knowledge.
2/ Welsh and English words are still separate in my head and the switching in of English borrowings slows down all my language processing functions, it is this which is incredibly frustrating.
Do other people strugle with this language switching. I am improving at it, but I feel it’s going to take a good while yet. I wonder if I’ll get enough vocab or not before it happens.
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Always worth remembering that Welsh speakers don’t exist just so that we can have a hobby, I think.
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Oh, do they not?! But it’s not that, it’s wanting to speak Welsh and realising how much of a drag it is not being passably fluent enough yet for rapid conversation about complex subjects not to tire me out within minutes.
This will only come with exposure. It does come but takes time. Try not to “understand” every word, because at this stage that means translating. So if you’re translating you’re not listening to the Welsh, which is why the English words trip you.
Let the context flow.
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I have a flip side to this conversation entirely based on one word. It’s a word I don’t use in Welsh because I don’t like it, and the few times its come up in conversation, the Welsh speaker has used the English word too.
I also had a conversation with @Deborah-SSi about this on bwtcamp.
The culprit:
Gliniadur
Cyfrifiadur means something that counts (more or less). It counts and computes.
Geiriadur contains words. It gives us meaning to words.
Laptops don’t give us knees. Therefore, until a new Welsh equivalent comes up or I learn a word in another mutually intelligible language, I will be staging my own rebellion and siarad am fy laptop.
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I get that. I’m often not translating, I’m learning how to switch that off when I hit an unknown word, as I used to guess from thinking about the sentence, which is less useful now. The perceived ‘English’ word kind of trips my brain into" Aha now, that word is English, I’ve forgotten it’s meaning [I do forget English words in Welsh mode, even if they are people, but whom I haven’t thought about in Welsh!], okay lets switch to English mode for a sec… ah ok, back to Welsh, oh drat, I’ve missed two whole sentences" Yet I am slowly being able to not have to switch modes quite as much, to just see everything as different words. I know it’ll come in time, it’s just frustrating waiting for it to improve. Sometimes it seems as though it would be just easier for me, in an entirely selfish way, if there weren’t so many ‘English’ words. Mae’n boncyrs!
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A universally shared issue for English speakers of second languages I’m sure.
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It would probably have been easier if I’d more exposure to other languages when I was younger. Also a fairly universally shared issue for English speakers when they learn second languages.
chei di ddim benthyg 'ngliniadur fi, felly 
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Llyfr-we?
shouldn’t i pad be i bad?
Interesting that. Even the English name is not all that appropriate. I’ve never used a laptop on my lap, and I don’t think I could, although I’ve seen younger, slimmer, and more flexible people doing it.
I remember when early non-desktop computers were called “portables”, but wags referred to them as “luggables” because of their arm-stretching properties.
And even when they came to be called laptops, by the time you’d added the weight of the power adapter and perhaps a manual or two, the whole package had a distinctly “luggable” feel to it.
And then, by becoming smaller and thinner, they stopped being laptops and started being notebooks, but the earlier name for the slightly bigger form stuck with the consumer, even though it’s not really used by the industry.
Should be nodiadur, then.
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