Hi Courtney,
I am doing the SSIC course and enjoying it too! On lesson 8 however I think I have spotted three errors! Twice a word seems to be lost in translation and the beginning of one phrase doesn’t seem to correspond with what was taught earlier. Of course I am only a novice and could easily have miss interpreted something incorrectly myself. Who should I discuss/report this to?
Chris
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Hi Chris,
The lessons here are created by, or under the guidance of, maga (Cornish language partnership). However, I’m not sure who exactly is responsible for the actual SSiC course there. I think @Iestyn might be the best person to ask about forwarding this question to them though.
Gav
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Thanks very much indeed for taking the time to let us know, Chris - we really appreciate it… 
I don’t suppose there’s any chance that you could remember/double-check what the errors were? That would make it possible for our lesson importing team to try and do a fix without having to go directly back to the translators (which would save time).
When you say ‘lost in translation’ - do you mean that the Cornish word is skipped in the model sentence?
Thanks again for your input… 
Hi Aran,
Thanks for your speedy response. Well of course I am only a very new learner of Cornish so I may have misunderstood things but here goes… Luckily I had the presence of mind to make a note of what I came across.
In Lesson 8.
@ approx. 12.58 ‘osya’ to try - is missing after Julia says "Me a vynncer …
@ approx. 27.48 again the word ‘osya’ to try - is omitted in translation.
@approx. 36.44 Gwell vyr dhymm osya = I’d better try. But the narrator says to translate from saying “I would like to try…” from what I understand from previously taught that should be “Me a vynncer osya …”
Hope I have listed everything clearly for you to check. If I have got it wrong I do apologise most profusely but if I have discovered some small errors then I must be taking things on board really well. I am enjoying the course and find it very challenging ( I am also learning Desky Kernewek with Dan Prohaska) so I should be able to have some understanding of both orthographies. Please excuse my Cornish spelling and would appreciate your feedback Aran. I wish you well with the SSIC course.
Chris
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Christopher,
Is there a good link for the terms used on the course. My ears are trying very hard to get to grips with the sounds and I guess that is how it works, but I have only managed to work through two lessons in two weeks and I think might it be quicker if I had a few things written down in the form of a cheatsheet to help.
I really have tried to do this without reading so far, so that I can at least try to have a go at sticking with the intention of the learning process, but it is really really hard.
Some have also posted that the accents didn’t sound Cornish, but to me the male voice is absolutely cornish - very Jethro and I think I am going to pick up some of the accent by the end of this - although it might take a year to get through the ten lessons at this rate
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Thank you so much, Chris, that’s hugely helpful - I’ll pass them on to our importing team - but you’re absolutely right that they’re not going to hinder the learning process for you, now you know that you’re in the right!
Our new course creation tool should make it much less likely to have little hiccups like that (although it’s always hard to rule out the possibility of a confident speaker looking at a sentence and just missing one of the words - we get it often enough on the Welsh course as well!).
Oh, really? On here, or somewhere else? I find it hard to imagine anyone much more Cornish than Pol, and he chose the female voice, so she must sound Cornish to him…
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Aran,
My apologies. I picked up on this early days and assumed madeupname 1 was referring to the accent, but I think it was more the style now that I have had a chance to go back and have a look
Pol does have a very heavy Cornish accent, which I like.
I am also trying in my mind to match Welsh cognates to the Cornish words - that seems to be helping me - i don’t know the spellings in Cornish, but what I hear as me aven seems to link to moyn, better than want and the me a el sound however that is spelt sounds like a gallu sort of thing. When I hear a diwetha or a dydd, which I know is a dydh then I’m starting to fly a bit. kawnsel kernowek sounds like canu kernoweg to me - which does for a cognate in my mind. This is going to be an interesting challenge, which I’m starting to enjoy
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Oh yes. My thoughts exactly. I would be very very grateful if someone posted a guide to the words and chunks used in the lessons. I also have a very bad phonemic hearing, so it’s twice as hard as it must be for a normal person.
I think @faithless78 wanted to do a Course guide some time ago?
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Seren,
I’d be happy to have a go at cheatsheets for the first few lessons and it might be a good part of the learning process. I would need to get some reference materials though first to work from and an someone to act as an editor to check things. It should be a side of A4 or less for each lesson, not a great deal I suspect, but if @faithless78 has already had a go that would be great
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I’ve found it most helpful to get hold of a few Cornish textbooks (Skeul an Yeth book 1 is available free online) and other books that are either familiar ones translated into Cornish (such as Winnie-the-Pooh) or are bilingual Cornish-English, and just practise with them. It also helps to have a Cornish dictionary on hand (there are a few available in print form and an online one here: http://www.cornishdictionary.org.uk/). Even if I can’t understand everything I’m reading, it’s a big help in getting a feel for the language and how things are spelled. The Cornish courses on Memrise are quite useful as well.
I’d be happy to help with a guide to the words in SSiC as well, if someone gives the go-ahead for there to be one. I did post the vocabulary from Lesson 1 some time ago (spelled correctly as far as I know):
my a vynn - I want
my a yll - I can
gul - to do
gweles - to see
My a vynn gul - I want to do
My a vynn y wul - I want to do it
My a yll gweles - I can see
My a yll y weles - I can see it
ha (hag before vowel) - and
kewsel Kernewek - to speak Cornish
konvedhes - to understand
dybri - to eat
kavos - to have
neppyth - something
lemmyn - now
diwettha - later
res yw dhymm - I need
da yw genev vy - I like
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I was just going to try and look for you post, I did remember you kindly posted the words from the first lessons some time ago.
I agree, Skeul an Yeth is a very useful book, but the vocab doesn’t really coincide with the first SSIC lessons, they kind of supplement each other.
That would be great! And, forgot to wrote it in the other thread - the book about Welsh traditions is wonderful, thank you so much for the link.
I’m just working on the Lesson 2 vocab now and will see how much further I can get with it — I’ll start a new discussion thread and post it there so others can find it.
Fantastic - I got most of these wrong in my mind and res yw dhim was one I really couldn’t get - I have replayed it several times
Thanks, Toffidil. I’ve started a new thread and done the first three lessons so far — won’t have time for any more today, but I’m happy to keep going with it.
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Dydh da oll, just thought I’d say hi, I’m learning kernewek at a weekly class and a couple of weeks ago the tutor told us about ssic and suggested we all give it a go.
I thought I’d mention as well the book we use in our class is Cornish This Way-Holyewgh an lergh we are working towards the examinations and I find it quite a useful book.
Also aside from here and I don’t know if it’s been mentioned before but there are several Facebook groups where you can see written Cornish or interact with other speakers
I pledge to become more fluent in Cornish is a good one for example
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absolutely brilliant. Meur ras, gromerci
Hey everyone!
I was going to have a go at this just before Autumn last year. To be honest I have been rather busy with work and concentrating on finding ways to improve my spoken Welsh. At the start of the new year, I began looking into my other long-term interest, which is learning Irish Gaelic.
I will look into Cornish once again as soon as new lessons start appearing regularly, so I can (hopefully) pace it through to the end of the course by the time lesson 25 comes around!
I have seen that @Courtenay has already made a start on this though, and is using the online dictionary provided by maga. I think this was the worry for me when I thought about writing up a course guide because the dictionary gives many examples of spellings and I was never sure which one to use - which seemed a task in itself. Looking up proper spellings in Cymraeg was easier because in the years I’ve been learning I’ve amassed quite a library of different dictionaries and grammar books, be it in book form, or of online/app resources, something that is lacking currently in Cornish (although I have come into possession of a schools dictionary in PDF form. This is currently available for free on the maga website, although you will need to hunt for it!!).
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Hi @faithless78,
Thanks for the reminder about the PDF school dictionary — you’re right, it’s not easy to find (I’d forgotten where it was!). Here’s the link to where you can download it: http://www.magakernow.org.uk/default.aspx?page=950
Apart from that, there are also a few Cornish-English dictionaries available in print that I know of. Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek (the Cornish Language Fellowship) has three available to buy here: http://www.cornish-language.org/Cornish-language-books.html — scroll down the page to “Cornish language dictionaries”. I think all three of them are in Kernewek Kemmyn (Common Cornish) rather than the Standard Written Form that MAGA uses, but there are very few major differences between the two spelling systems, as far as I’ve ever noticed (just a matter of a letter or two different here and there).
I would guess there are also dictionaries available for the other two major spelling systems — Unified Cornish and Late Cornish — but I’m not sure where to find them.
The Kowethas’ online shop also has a range of Cornish grammar books and other books for students. I can’t comment on most of them, as I’ve never used them, but I do have Holyewgh an Lergh which @shaunrennie_plume also mentioned. I find that one is quite useful and easy to follow as well.
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Perhaps I could give one answer to this from an Irish perspective. One of the things I heard a lot on returning to Ireland after many years in the UK was “At least you haven’t lost your accent”. At the time I was trying to improve my Irish and found the comment quite annoying. I thought myself that my Hiberno-English accent was well faded by then but I really wanted to reply “What earthly difference does it make whether I have lost an ‘Irish’ accent in English when we are all busily ridding ourselves of an entire language and all that is contained in it”. This differs from the Cornish in that they are reviving a language that had lost all its native speakers so perhaps their responses would have been quite different?
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Thanks, Dyvrig (I’d almost forgotten I brought up that issue months ago!) — very interesting to read your thoughts. I don’t live in Cornwall — I’m just part Cornish by ancestry — so I can’t speak for Cornish people in general and how they feel about these things. But I haven’t had the impression that most Cornish people who learn Kernewek are doing so with the thought of “ridding” themselves of the English language and all it carries with it.
When I did visit the Yeth an Werin (informal Cornish speakers’ group) that I mentioned in that previous post and asked them why they chose to learn Cornish, I only got a few answers and they were all rather lukewarm — along the lines of “it’s an interesting intellectual exercise”, “it’s a hobby”, “it’s all around us in the place names so I just wanted to learn it”, and so on. They were lovely friendly people, but frankly, most of their time was spent chatting around the table in English and only occasionally attempting — usually when pushed by the group’s organiser — to try translating what they were saying into Cornish. So I never did get around to asking them what they say when someone asks “Why bother learning a language that nobody speaks?”… 