I previously posted about one of my failures, so here I am balancing my forum karma.
Last night I saw some friends/former colleagues, one of whom is a Welsh speaker. It was the first proper in-person conversation I’ve had in Welsh and it couldn’t have gone much better. Only one thing I said was wrong enough to hinder understanding (of course in the cold light of morning I’ve realised other mistakes I made, but clearly context was enough to get around them). My friend was very impressed with what I’d learnt in 5 months (of course I had pre-empted some of the conversation and rehearsed some answers in the shower earlier in the day, but I do that even in English sometimes).
My Welsh learning has taken a bit of a diversion recently - I wasn’t enjoying the level 3 challenges as much, partly because I’ve been too tired/preoccupied for the level of challenge and partly because they don’t feel as cohesive as levels 1 and 2, so I’ve been doing the old course instead. I’ve seen in a thread here that a lot of people did this in the past while waiting for level 3 to be released. It has been filling in a lot of gaps for me and the combination of the two courses was, I think, a big factor in my success last night.
My friend is from Cardiff and I’ve been doing the Northern course, but it caused no problems at all (I know people say it won’t, but when you read about some of the differences you can’t help being daunted)
I’ll finish by sharing the biggest compliment, which was to the effect of:
“If I didn’t know you and you hadn’t said anything else, from the first two words you said I’d have thought you were a Welsh speaker from North Wales”.
