Yet another new experience… this is the first time I’ve posted a message here, though I’ve been an ardent SSiW fan for years!
I am longing to attend one of the Bootcamps, and will at some point, but am very grateful for this encouragement to step up my Welsh lessons while not traveling away from my home town in upstate New York.
I followed the advice not to redo a lesson I had done, so jumped in with Lesson 1 of Course 3 (Northern). It was a good challenge, but not too hard, which was a good way to start. Since I had set aside an hour, I decided to look around for something else, and did Vocab Lesson 10 from Course 2. Yikes! I had forgotten a lot of those verbs. It was a good refresher, and I’ll certainly do that one again!
I am fortunate to be taking a once a week Welsh class, and I have some friends/classmates to practice with. But the SSiW lessons have been tremendously helpful in having some words and phrases come out very naturally.
Although I’m sure that this has been said many times, I think that it doesn’t hurt for Aran and Iestyn to hear this again… I am continually amazed at what phrases I can come up with that I would never have guessed I could say in Welsh, thanks to your lessons bendigedig! I have been quite reluctant to speak Welsh, although I know a fair amount of vocabulary, but it’s the stringing the words together part that gets me stumped. But once you say a phrase that you think I should be able to come up with, far more often than not, I do! I am really grateful for that.
I had an unexpected chance to speak Welsh yesterday, when I ran into one of my fellow Welsh class students on our town bus. We proceeded to speak Welsh the whole way to campus. That was a really great breakthrough.
Although my head is smoking a little bit now, I am happily surprised at having completed the first five lessons of Course 3 in the first half of the 10 day challenge. There is no way I would have done that on my own, without the online bootcamp. Diolch yn fawr iawn eto! Now for today’s tricky challenge…
Diolch yn fawr iawn for letting us know about the podcasts on bbc.co.uk That’s a treasure trove. I didn’t even mind the fact that I could barely understand a word that woman being interviewed said! I’m really glad to have a new way of listening to Welsh, and I’ll keep up that practice of writing down what I hear, and listening again to add some new pieces.
