Hi all, random question for all.
How long did everyone do SSIW before they started to feel confident to speak basic Welsh? I’m on 13 hours of Automagic now
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I can’t speak for myself because I didn’t learn with SSiW, but I know loads of people who did and some were confident to speak in Welsh very quickly, whilst others took much, much longer - it has a more to do with how confident you are in conversation to start with than how much Welsh you’ve learnt.
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I think I met up with other local learners in Oxford for the first time just after finishing Level 1 of the old challenges - which, seeing as I repeated one or two of them before I learnt not to, was probably after about 13 hours of SSiW. I did feel a bit hopelessly out of my depth; but, at the same time, I was saying things like “It’s difficult because I can’t think in Welsh”, when 13 hours of anything else would have had me saying “My name is Richard, I am on holiday, two beers and a retsina, please.” And it got better from there on.
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I learned long before Automagic, so on the “old” course. I started in the September, and about halfway through December a crew of people came on the bus from Cardiff to the Christmas market in Bath (where I was living at the time), and I met up with them and spent a few hours entirely in Welsh. I didn’t say a lot, and there plenty of things I didn’t understand (and my brain felt totally fried by the end of it) - but given that most evening classes wouldn’t have got past the introduction stage at this point it was remarkable how much I could say!
But I don’t think anyone is confident when they first try to speak the basic Welsh that they have - the confidence comes from going out and speaking it! As in, the more you do it the more confident you become.
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Hi all, thanks to everyone for their fantastic responses 
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Absolutely. And it’s important to remember that “confident” is not the same thing as “correct” and can (and should) co-exist with “wrong” quite happily. If you’re using Welsh to get your meaning across, that’s all that matters at the time. Growing vocabulary and grammar will come, and no-one, not even Mr King, gets it right all the time 
.
I would much rather hear someone say “fi ydy y rownd nesaf” than sit in miserable silence trying to work through mutations in their head. And not buying a round!
A hoffwn i beint, diolch.
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Not even Mr King is infallible?
Say it ain’t so!
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