Hello! I’m CJ, and I’m Online Boot-Camping it for a 10 Day-er. I’m afraid what little Welsh I had is all in tatters since adulthood, and I live now in the US near my mum, but not near my dad’s family across the pond in Wales.
I’ve been epically excited about Welsh – or re-excited – since I read a letter of Tolkien’s recalling his childhood experience of reading Welsh words off the side of a railway car, and falling in love it, though he couldn’t pronounce or understand it. I’ve studied Italian and Russian and Spanish (mum is UK, but half Spanish) since I was small; and I’m used to dropping in all sorts of non-English words as I go about my day. But not usually to the clerk or fellow-passers-by on the pavement.
Anyhow, Mae’n dda gen i gwrdd â ti? If I’ve got that somewhat right?
What a lovely collection of languages you have. I’ll look forward very much to hearing how you feel about your Welsh as you work your way through the ups and downs of the next 10 days…
And yes (although if you’re speaking to the whole forum, you’ll probably want to swap the ‘ti’ for a ‘chi’!)…
I did get a dialogue spun out with a friend. But they were flippant and resistant. Anyhow, that made it much more fun to insist they read their part aloud after we’d done it. I couldn’t get five different people to act it out with me, not even asking a couple of strangers at the coffee shop down the street.
But Welsh is brill to shout dramatically.
“Dwi’n licio siarad Cymraeg!” were my final lines in the dialogue. THAT I shouted with happy disregard for eavesdroppers and innocent bystanders alike on the beach today.
It took, oh, three times to remember my partner’s lines.
“Dw i ddim yn fwyta gluten” was the sentence I had the hardest time translating. (“I don’t eat gluten”–I have celiac.) In fact, the translating was most frustrating as I wanted to get the precise meaning and didn’t have enough words, even though I pick things up by ear quickly. I wish I could do the in-person boot
camp.
CJ, with that kind of can-do attitude, you’re going to do brilliantly - not just with the online Bootcamp, but with Welsh as a whole…
Yes, you’d be fine with that - technically, it’s ‘dwi ddim yn bwyta’, but we play fast and loose with mutations, so it’s never worth worrying about them…
