Considering the circumstances you’ve described, I’d say you’re doing wonderfully well!
There are a couple of things it’s worth bearing in mind with the SSiW course - firstly, while there’s no doubting that some people are high-repetition learners, don’t feel that you have to repeat until you have every sentence down to perfection. There is repetition built into the course, often by repeating blocks of phrases and joining them to other blocks of phrases, so it’s not a case of learning things parrot fashion and moving on.
Secondly, the course is flexible and can be adapted to meet the needs of individuals, so it’s not really a case of “following the program properly” (there had to be some sort of guidelines to follow, but they’re not set in stone!) - do what you can when you can, repeat as little or as often as you want (but avoid aiming for perfection before moving on), and take a break when you need to so that doing a bit now and then is more like a welcome task to return to rather than a chore of “keeping up” (there’s no one to ‘keep up’ with - it’s your path, and you can take it at your speed).
Diolch! Thank you very much, that’s reassuring. As much as I am trying not to aim for perfection I do find it hard to move forward without a certain degree of confidence, unless the Welsh comes to me almost without thinking I go in to a spin and then can’t come up with anything useful at all!
@beatrice that’s a very common reaction at first until you get used to this way of learning and can really accept that making mistakes is an important part of learning. So every time you think you haven’t a clue, but blurt out ‘something’ in Welsh then compare what you said to what comes back, your brain stores away a little bit more information about the Welsh until the day arrives when you open your mouth and out it comes, almost without thinking. I agree with Siaron, you’re doing very well already!
Hello all, here’s a question about pronunciation. I’ve never tried learning Welsh before, I live in England and have had almost no passive exposure to Welsh which means that the sounds of the language are very new to me. I’ve amazed myself by arriving at Challenge 6, level 1 and I think I might be just about getting the idea of welcoming my mistakes or at least not getting hung up on them, but the thing that is bothering me is whether I should be doing extra practice to try and get my tongue around all these new sounds, for example pronouncing my r’s properly, making a clear distinction between the “rh” sound in a word like “rhwbeth” and the “r” in “rŵan”, getting my tongue in the right place fast enough to try and pronounce the “ll” sound in phrases like “rhwbeth arall” and “dw i angen gwella”. The “ch” sound is also a bit of a challenge, I’m sure it shouldn’t be giving me a sore throat but at times that’s the sensation I’m getting. Are there any other former complete novices out there that could offer some advice on whether these sounds will just become natural if I press on with the course, or if I should take some extra time outside of the challenges and Automagic to keep practising them so hopefully my tongue and other mouth muscles will learn how to produce them quickly and easily?
While I had previously made a point of learning the ch sound so as not to get told off by my Scottish mother for calling lochs locks, other than I hadn’t any real experience of Celtic sounds before starting SSi. People tell me my pronunciation is fine.
My habit through the challenges is to say what I think it should be, and then after the first time it’s said on the recording, I repeat that, trying to match pronunciation, intonation, and if possible speed as exactly as I can manage. If there’s time I might even say it a third time, but I won’t hit the pause button in order to make that happen, and usually I’m too slow for that.
I feel that repetition of what I hear helps me get in the practice I need at speaking the words naturally and as phrases, instead of hesitantly and one… or two… words… at a time.
And of course, sometimes now but especially earlier on, I trip over my tongue and just sputter helplessly, but still, I keep on and find the next time those words come up I do better.
And by the way, if you’ve got as far as challenge 6 without throwing in the towel, you definitely have what it takes to become a confident speaker! Da iawn chi!
If it helps at all by way of encouragement, I’ve found that people who learn Welsh using SSiW have very natural sounding accents when speaking Welsh. My first language Welsh friend says the same. Keep going, do your best to copy the speakers in the challenges and the new sounds will gradually start to feel more natural.
When I first started learning Welsh, the only way I could get this out without choking was to have a cup of tea first to moisten my throat.
But as others have said, just keep trying to imitate the speakers and you’ll gradually get closer and closer to their pronunciation as your mouth and jaw muscles adjust. You’re doing really well already!
Deborah has a good point here - it is very difficult to make that sound if you’re dehydrated! Another reason (besides little things like the risk of kidney stones and/or heatstroke) to make sure you drink at least 4 pints / 2 litres of water per day.
Hello,
Ive jist started SSiW 6 mins a day about 3 weeks ago. I usually use my phone as its with me most of the time. However i find that the weekly challenge doesnt remember where i last stopped so unless i want to do 30 lind all at once, i either need to start from the beginning each day or try and skip forward to find where i last stopped.
Is there a way to fix this?
I found that Automagic remebers where i am up to and i am really enjoying that pace and style. But i dont think the vocab matches up with the 6 mins a day weekly challenges?
Is it an issue at all if i just stuck with Automagic?
I’ve been doing the AutoMagic SSiW for a few weeks now for a few minutes most days (and loving it), but out of curiosity (okay, I’m nosy), I was poking around and looking at the vocabulary lists for the challenges. Yeah, I know you advise against it and I absolutely agree, it’s something that I had noticed myself over the years (I’ve been learning French, Italian and German, now Welsh, and am starting a course of Latin in October), but I digress.
I think I chose Southern Welsh in AutoMagic, as that’s where I tend to visit most often when I’m in Wales but I wasn’t quite sure from the AutoMagic settings, so I looked at the challenges on the website to see if I could identify the variant from what I’ve learnt so far.
The majority of what I’ve learnt is indeed the Southern version except the Southern vocabulary list in the challenges has eisiau (isie) for “to need” and ma eisiau i fi for “I need to” whereas I’ve been learning that as angen and dw i angen, which I notice appears in the Northern vocabulary list for the challenges.
Hi Tan,
I’ll tag @Deborah-SSi here because she’ll be able to advise better then me about the stopping/skipping forward bit.
However, I can say that it’s not an issue to stick with automagic. It works in a slightly different way but covers the same material.
eisiau (isie) for “to need” and ma eisiau i fi for “I need to” are Southern forms that you wouldn’t hear as much in the North, so that’s why they’re in the Southern course. However, whilst angen is the commonest form in the North, it’s also very common in parts of the South, so whilst it’s included in the Northern course, you’ll also find it in the wild in the South.
The tip is to use whichever forms your comfortable with or that you hear most when you’re in the area you visit and just to be aware of the alternative form so that it doesn’t throw you too much if someone else uses it.
Ah, thanks. I was just surprised that the AutoMagic southern version uses a northern expression - for a moment I wondered which version I was using
Do Welsh speakers generally know both regardless of which they use themselves, that is to say, If I were to use angen to someone who uses eisiau, would I be understood?
Yes, generally they do (they’ll have heard both versions on radio and TV etc, and it’s not as if people from N and S never mix!), so you would be understood.
Is there any simple guide to how AutoMagic and the challenges line up time-wise?
An “At x level of confidence / repetition settings, it will take y minutes to cover the material given in one 30 min challenge” kind of thing?
Otherwise users must just check the vocab lists (oh no, not reading!) and judge by when all those words have come up on AutoMagic?
I’ve stuck to mp3 challenge files I’ve downloaded myself (if I don’t do a whole challenge in one go, my phone’s player stays open and paused at the right spot, or else I make a note of the time index) so this is just curiosity on my part really, but I think a lot of people might find such a guide helpful.
I do realise of course that people can change their confidence levels around at any time, as well as skipping forwards and back, so it could only ever be a rough guide.
But someone in the tech team must have at least a vague idea of how many hours it takes to get through the material at each speed, if you just set it at the start and run through with no skipping or back-tracking? Someone must know how much material you loaded in there, and know how the repeats for each confidence level are set up.
I have no idea to be honest. I’ll tag @Hendrik who knows more about automagic than me, and I’ll tag @aran because he might know the plan it was originally designed to.
Thank you for tagging me, but my knowledge is purely usage-based, with a bit of extrapolation based on my general knowledge of computer software. In order to answer @verity-davey 's question with any level of certainty, we’d need someone with actual “under the hood” knowledge. (And even then it might still be a very rough estimate, because of the underlying randomness of the phrase generation)
- for a moment I wondered which version I was using