Great Clare, diolch yn fawr. I’ll try and make it and maybe bring a friend.
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Hope to are you there!
Wela i di yno gobeithio 
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Mae tywydd yn edrych yn dda 
I wish I was in Llandudno. The forecast where I’m at is predicting upper eighties to mid-nineties for this week. (30-34°C). We have 31% humidity right now, and it’s miserable outside.
This week’s challenge for me at Week 4 on the Deep End is to learn a song—by heart.
I know what it will be and so far can manage the first verse of a beautiful Plygain carol that I love. It’s long though. However, there are still 167 days to Christmas… maybe 166 where you are… just saying.
Now wouldn’t that be brilliant… a Slack Plygain session around the world with folk chiming in as tradition would have us do and local time zones allow.
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That sounds great. A 24 hour, online, Plygain. Count me in!
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Dw i ar y fford yn cerdedd o gorsaf tren.
Lle mae pawb? Mae’na tri o honnyn ni yn y bar.
I have so many!
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I had a joking/playful argument with my friend in Caernarfon about sports (started over him dismissing the US women’s FIFA victory because they’re women
), including some sassy responses on my part -
Accidentally understood a full line in Heno Yn Yr Anglesey once I learned the word “aros”
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Had a few drinks too many with friends, started speaking Cymraeg, someone took a video, and watching it back I saw that I was actually speaking clearly and correctly, and my tipsy Cymraeg was actually clearer than my tipsy English! Which is a good sign for when I start visiting pubs in and around Bangor
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Can sing/play Allwedd by Bwncath on guitar almost completely by heart and I understand 90% of it
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Can sing/play Drwy Dy Lygid Di by Yws Gwynedd on piano and I understand about 60-70% of this one
There’s a few others, and now that I’ve got this thread bookmarked, I’ll be sure to come back and add to my list 
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Doesn’t it feel great? I was just in Wales for a week and had warned myself (this is the kind of insanity that can set in when you live alone) that if I didn’t speak to someone in Welsh on my first day (and a whispered ‘diolch’ wouldn’t count), I wasn’t allowed a G&T in the evening. I was so nervous you’d have thought I’d been asked to sing Queen of the Night at the Carnegie Hall. But I found my victims, told them ‘dw i newydd dechrau dysgu’ and was rewarded with big smiles and ‘da iawn ti’. Little triumphs…
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Yes, I’m starting to say the wrong words. For instance talking on the hangout today I said 'chwarae" instead of 'chwaneg". I had no idea I had got it wrong. I know the two words since childhood, so I think it was more a slip of the tongue than a learners mistake, which I think shows that my brain is processing the language differently.
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Think it’s a small breakthrough. Certainly it is something new for me to understand any radio or TV in Welsh apart from the odd basic word. Now that I have more phrases in my head which people actually use I am starting to hear them. After having a look around S4C on iPlayer, I found some lovely children’s programmes and am understanding more and more and learning as I go. It’s about my level ;0)
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Massive breakthrough yesterday! I had an hour long conversation in Welsh with the amazing, patient and funny @carin-harris 
I was very nervous beforehand as I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly know sufficient Welsh. I only started to learn in January! But Caz was very encouraging and we had a proper conversation about a whole range of topics, including dogs, Sci Fi, and beaches!
True, I had to be creative with some sentences and I lapsed a couple of times with ‘really?’, but it felt very natural to be conversing in Welsh.
I live in England and my only opportunities to speak Welsh are via SSiW so I’m very grateful to all of the amazing women I speak to regularly.
I felt exhilarated and exhausted afterwards. Very, very proud of myself but with a splitting headache. I assume it was the result of forcing my brain to combine my learning and construct new, comprehensible sentences. I slept it off and the exhilaration remains.
I am very glad that I took the plunge and met the challenge.
I’m also very glad that I took the time to complete all of tasks along the way- all of the making up sentences each day using the lists of words and phrases etc. It certainly paid off. I love the two weekly challenges too. The structure of the course definitely suits me. Next to join in properly with a hangouts session!
So, I’m feeling very proud of myself! The process works. A diolch yn fawr iawn i pawb
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Wow… this just happened.
I was texting an acquaintance I met once before at a local Northern California Welsh meetup back in March to see about getting together to practice again. He is a more advanced speaker than I am, which is an exciting challenge for me.
I texted him in Saesneg, and he fortunately replied yn Gymraeg, which led to a flurry of texts about where and when to meet, and what to do, which weekends worked and which didn’t, how I have way too much time on my hands but I have been learning a lot… the whole while, I am keeping up and it was great! This is despite the fact that I’ve been doing the Southern course (six weeks to go! 
) and he speaks Northern Welsh. It got even better still…
I couldn’t help telling him how I still need to improve but that I’ve been learning a lot and I am surprised at how much I can say now… and he responded with this:
“Rwyt t’in sgrifennu’n rhugl ac rwy’n cofio dy fod ti’n siarad yn dda hefyd.”
(The actual expression on my face at the time)
Holy freaking cow…! This blows me away on so many levels. Here are three:
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Fluent?!? Me?!? Whoa… I was literally just thinking about how I might finalllly reach my goal of being fluent in another language; though I have learned a lot of French, Spanish and Chinese, I’ve never quite felt I could say I was fluent. This afternoon, as I was catching up on weeks’ worth of posts in this very thread for inspiration, I thought to myself: I want to be able to say I am fluent in Welsh! Am I there yet, nah… did someone I have looked up to as a stellar Welsh speaker use that word to describe my writing today? YES! Wahoooooooooooo! I am beaming.
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When I last spoke Welsh to him, I was only halfway through Level 1, which I think says a LOT for the SSiW method!
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How funny is it that the only word I needed a dictionary for was yn rhugl?!? Hahahahaha, life is weird.
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I started off learning Welsh on Duolingo and they are very ‘in’ with the vegetables, especially parsnips (pannas) and carrots (moron) for some reason 
Handy though as I do a lot of gardening but I did convert to SSIW and I am now on level 2 SSIW.
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The updated version must have become more veg-friendly. I remember very few words from Duolingo, but I would have certainly remembered seeing panna(s) that means cream in Italian.
When I tried it there were a lot of cig involved. And selsig - that in my memory has some conflict with saesneg - with often hilarious results.
p.s. Even while I was trying to explain this strange thing to @Deborah-SSi, I ended up saying that Duolingo kept on making me say “dw i’n bwyta saesneg”! No way!
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Hey, that’s awesome! Da iawn ti! 
It’s really impressive seeing the difference in the ability to communicate in such a short time, isn’t it?
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