Brain straining bootcamp

So excited to have started the 10 day online bootcamp - with challenge 4 (de). Sometimes I had to use the pause button and I certainly didn’t get it right every time. I like the way it makes my brain hurt and I am also interested in it as a learning experience. I might have to greet the birds in the garden as I don’t think that I’ll see anyone to work on the challenge.

Hello, a bit confusing to see another Caroline White on here - where do you live? I’m in Devon.

Hi - I am just south of Aberystwyth. Like you - a little surprised to find another Caroline White. Thanks for saying hello.

Completed challenge 5 this afternoon - in the sunshine. It is difficult to know if I could tell someone else what I had learnt to say BUT I have found the list of terms in English a useful prompt.
As much of my life revolves around the garden and food, here’s a “typical” household conversation (attempt). Corrections welcome - diolch.

  1. Rwy eisiau bwyd.
  2. Wyt ti’n barod am ginio nawr?
  3. Ydw. Dw i’n moyn bwyta nawr.
  4. OK. Wyt ti’n moyn cawl dringo ffa gyda bara?
  5. Ydw. Diolch yn fawr. Bydd hynny’n dda.
  6. Bydd y cawl yn barod mewn deng munud.

That sounds like a terrific collection of useful phrases already - well done!..:smile:

We’ll have to find some way on the new forum to differentiate between people with the same name! That barcud (?) is pretty striking, though, so she’ll do for now!

I’ll look forward to hearing how the rest of the process goes for you…:smile:

I like the off-roading analogy for this learning experience - today’s challenge 6 made me feel out of control - again.
In terms of the boot camp challenge - I’ve made some progress but need to find more “players”. Maybe tomorrow.

The more you develop the ability to carry on while feeling out of control, the more you’ll accelerate…:seren:

Thank you Aran. I don’t know whether I would have believed this a year ago but having just completed challenge 7, without using the pause button as much as I did for challenge 6 I am willing to believe what you say. I am interested in where these techniques are being used in schools… (because I can’t quite forget my previous life - and I have very definite views on the attitudes of many, but not all, ex-language teaching colleagues…)
I haven’t been able to get more practice with my dialogue BUT as a result of having told a couple of people today, in Welsh, that I would like to speak more Welsh someone else suggested that he would organise for a group of speakers and beginners to get together regularly to develop our Welsh conversation. That would be a great step forward for me!
And a Greek woman with whom I was working today was very interested in the short section of ssiw challenge 1 which I played her today.
thank you

I am interested in where these techniques are being used in schools…

Only in random bits and pieces here and there, as far as I’m aware. I’m hoping that once we’ve got some decent lines of research going (I’ll be at Cardiff University for a month early springtime) we can start putting some overviews of the processes together to present to people in education.

Fantastic result that you’ve found someone interested in getting a group together! That’s a gigantic step forward which will make an enormous difference for you…:star:

And thank you so much for spreading the word!..:smile:

The research sounds interesting!
I am resisting the temptation to listen to things again but I am getting increasingly frustrated with my continued confusion with eisiau, hoffen i and moyn (spellings???)…. oh well. I’ll try to keep the faith.
Three long sentences challenge - I decided not to try them last night as I knew that it would keep me awake, which it then did at 6am. Good fun, and I think that the first listening practice nicely gets one brain working that way.

Although I have not finished the last two boot camp challenges I have worked on today’s. Is that because I knew that it should only take 10 minutes or because I liked the idea of it. I guess that I thought about the sort of things that I should think about in order to complete the challenge. So it was all to do with what I did and why. However, it is the kind of process that I sometimes find myself doing - even when waking up in the middle of the night. It’s fascinating to feel the brain churning when doing this. When “doing” the 10 minutes I did talk out loud (uchel mas??) and I think that helped me to focus my thinking. So, I should have known only (dim ond?) and cyn bo hir (before?), and I might have guessed that piano is piano.
I am wondering what will happen to my use of ssiw - when it is too cold to talk to the birds in the garden and when work starts/ my boot camp ends. This is partly due to my previous preferred learning involving classes and commitments. Thanks for the challenges.

I am getting increasingly frustrated with my continued confusion with eisiau, hoffen i and moyn

This is a standard difficulty - but the answer isn’t about language, it’s about calmness - accept that you’re dealing with words that have similar areas of use, and that they’ll overlap - sometimes naturally, in the way a first language speaker would vary them, sometimes in way you might think of as ‘wrong’ - but the more exposure you get, the more they’ll settle down and become natural for you.

The only way it can go wrong is if you let your frustration upset you - which is why I say the calmer and more accepting of the process you can be, the easier it will feel…:smile:

Yes - I did finish all of the challenges, but not quite within the 10 days. I found it easier to speak to other people when I had the reason “I need to do this for my homework - please help me” than I would have done if I was just looking to practise. But I also found that the bootcamp process did give me the confidence to speak more - I even managed to phone up a Welsh speaking friend, from the past, to speak my 3 long sentences. I just need the confidence now to sign up to ffrindiath.
I will be interested to find out where my brain is at after its two week holiday, although I continue to enjoy listening to Radio Cymru. I think that I will also try to carry on listening to the pigion casts and writing down the things that I hear.
So, thank you to Aran for the learning experience. I am certainly recommending it to others.

1 Like

That sounds as though you’ve got a lot out of it, Caroline - well done for putting the effort in! :star2:

I’m particularly pleased to hear that it helped you talk more to other people - the earlier in the learning process you start using your Welsh with other people, the faster you’ll go, and yet it’s one of the easiest things to put off ‘for a while’ - so huge congratulations to you for having started to break through that barrier :thumbsup:

I have now completed the bootcamp follow up with listening to previous challenges. I certainly found that I was feeling more confident - although I still struggled with one phrase which made me need to listen to the challenge again the next day.
I realise that I do work better with some structure / commitment to completing a task. So, I now need to work out how I am getting to get the best out of the ssiw challenges without a bootcamp driving me. Do I go back to repeating the challenges until I “get them”? And how often should I be aiming to work on them? It does seem that some intensive work, followed by a break might be a way forward.
I know that learning this way is making more inclined to Say Something - so the course does what it says on the tin. Thank you again.

No, no, no, very much not, please! If you only struggled with ONE phrase after your revisit post-Bootcamp, you are doing STAGGERINGLY well, and definitely do NOT need to revive the habit of repeating sessions.

It sounds certain to me that you are a very good match for the intense approach - so why not aim for a chunk of time (as much as you can manage) once a week, or once a fortnight? And just keep going, and get through as many sessions as you can in that time - and then the next time, start with the next new lesson. I suspect that will see you fly through the course - and once you’ve finished (Course 1?) you can always go back and spot check a couple of sessions to see if you feel good about them :sunny:

Being nosey what’s happening with this?

Catching the train from Bangor on Tuesday morning, and then in Cardiff until the 12th of March - couple of conferences during the lexical studies month, a lecture to undergraduates, chairing a discussion group, and plenty of reading, listening and wondering out loud. :sunny: