Many thanks for taking the time to reply and offer this advice @David_B . What you say makes a lot of sense to me as I have dipped into some random old course challenges. I definitely agree that the new course gets you speaking more quickly which is brilliant but for me a bit more practice on grammar now I’ve got this far would be useful.
I also have Slack access now so I will be exploring what’s on offer there too.
Diolch yn fawr iawn.
Hi I feel very foolish even asking this. I have downloaded the new App but my format seems exactly the same as the old SSinW format.
I can only access this site through your Monday email.
I looked at a question someone asked about the first lesson and I didn’t recognise what they were talking about. They were talking about I can’t. And short versions. Mine is still fedra I dim. No short version Your pre sign up blurb seemed so good but what I have … nothing has changed Sorry to be so dense…
I only hit reply because I couldn’t see any way of sending my first forum question!
Hi Janey, there’s no such thing as foolish questions here!
You can access this site anytime through a browser. If you go to the Saysomethinginwelsh main page, click on ‘community’ and then on ‘forum’ and it’ll bring you right here.
As far as I’m aware, the course material hasn’t changed between the ‘online’ and ‘app’ versions, they are simply different platforms.
‘Fedra i ddim’ is the short version. The long version is “dwi ddim yn medru”.
And as for posting your first forum question - you did it fine! 
Diolch! I can’t access the main page from my SSinW lesson page.
…So I have to type into my browser each time do I? The pre sign up blurb looked as if I would be able access everything from the app.
Perhaps my expectations have all been wrong 
ah well!
To be honest, I’ve never used the app, so I don’t know how everything shows up on the screen. However, there are plenty of people here that have/do use it, so I’ll tag a few to see if they can offer any further advice - I’m sure there must be an answer!
@rich @Hendrik @gisella-albertini @Deborah-SSi
Hi @JaneyC, are you talking about the SSiW app that just gives you the audio files? Or do you mean the new AutoMagic ‘web app’?
Or when you say “from my SSinW lesson page”, do you mean that you receive your email, you click on the link which takes you to your Challenge for the week, then you can’t find the main website from there?
If it’s the standard SSiW app, then that is just a shortcut to let you easily download and play the audio files. It’s not actually a course, so you do need to go to the website for anything else.
If you’re in your Weekly Challenge page from clicking on the link, then you just need to click on ‘Learn’ at the top and it gives you access to everything else.
If it’s the new AutoMagic app, once you’re in there, there isn’t a direct way back to the main website, but if you go to the main website first, you can easily click on ‘Learn’ then ‘AutoMagic Beta’ if it’s that that you want to do.
Thanks Deborah-SSi
Yes it was the Auto whatever… I was thinking about…I hadn’t remembered that it had a different name etc… I will have an experiment later and see what I can find. The advertising showed a child with the new App who appeared to be accessing the audio files whilst using it…perhaps I just got the wrong end of the stick!
The AutoMagic app is based on the material from the audio files, so that’s maybe why you thought you could access them that way. It presents the same learning material, but in a different way.
Excellent - that sense of being able to see some things through the mist is exactly how the journey works when you’re doing the right things - and gradually the mist will lift, as long as you keep walking through it often enough…
Hello there. I’m working my way through the 6 Minutes a Day course and have just completed week 4. I’m a little concerned because there’s a couple of uses that I feel like I missed somehow. There were a few sentences that seemed to include the word ‘to’ before the verb while others didn’t and I’m finding that quite confusing. I can’t exactly remember what the other instance was but it was something similar, where a small word like a preposition was added in.
In addition, at the end of the week 4 audio, it says to repeat it until I can do 80% without the pause button but the text underneath seems to say not to do that. I was under the impression that I only needed to do each week’s audio once, otherwise it’s going to take me much longer than a year! Should I be repeating them? Would it be best for me to repeat the first few in case I have missed something?
Also, I know the SSi method is focussed more on speaking and listening, rather than reading and writing, but there are the vocab lists included. When should I start introducing text to my learning?
I think those are all my questions for now, I’m sure I’ll come up with more at a later date!
@nathaniel what you’re noticing is that some verbs in Welsh have a preposition like “to” following them, e.g. mynd i - “to go to”. The “i” follows mynd rather than being a word before another verb. When you come across these, learn them together as a pair. You’ll get used to the sound of them and it will feel natural to you.
The audio instructions are old, included at a time when there was no written course text and we found that people were repeating and repeating each Challenge aiming for perfection. The 80% was to try and encourage them to move on.
You can get away with only doing the Challenge once, as the material is repeated to give you practice as you move through, but some people do like to do each Challenge two or three times during the week, before moving to the next one on the following Monday. It depends on how much time you have and how it works best for you.
The Vocab Lists are really just there for you to check over what you’ve learnt and start putting the sounds together with the written version. It’s always advisable to focus on the speaking and listening for some time until you’re confident with the sounds, as seeing the written words too early can influence your pronunciation.
This is a comment, followed by a question. I’m at challenge 4 and doubt that anything after lesson 2 has gone in - the past tenses & latest vocab are baffling my memory!!! I find the Welsh translations come so fast that I have to use the pause button every time… I’m getting on better with automagic which is slower & I find the written phrases help me… QUESTION Is it essential to do each challenge in a week? How have others coped with it? It seems silly to forge ahead when I don’t feel this is being internalied any more… Advice welcomed. And PS: I do love learning this: just having a frustrating week.
It seems to me that sometimes I am hearing a pronunciation as “th” and sometimes as “v”. Are my ears deceiving me or is this the case (as in ddiddorol which I hear as vivorol)?
The course is very flexible and lots of people adapt it to their needs, some do a challenge a week, some find they can go faster and some need extra time - whatever works for you. But the main thing is, don’t aim for perfection before moving on - there is repetition built into the course so it’s not as if you only have one shot at the phrases in any one week, and many, many posts on the forum reveal that other people who have been convinced that nothing has sunk in are pleasantly surprised to find later that it actually did! Remember, the way SSiW is taught is a very different method (aural rather than visual) than many of us are used to, so it’s not surprising that it takes a while longer for the brain to process this type of method, however, it really does work if you can stick at it.
It’s very common for some people to hear th as v and vice versa, so you’re by no means alone. Given time, the brain does eventually sort this out though.
I don’t think I had it specifically with ddiddorol but it has happened to me with some other words. I posted in an old thread about it not long ago. It still happens to me occasionally, but it gets better. I think perhaps you start to subconsciously recognise where it doesn’t sound right.
Very helpul,thank you. I was feeling rushed to complete in a week, but I’ll relax around that now.
So just to be sure - is dd always pronounced th?
The digraph dd is always pronunced as a voiced th-sound, so always as in this or that.
(The Welsh th is always pronounced as an unvoiced th-sound, as in think)