Excellent, well done! 
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Just heard lesson 20…ouch!!! I have one thing to say to you Aran, in this the tennis season…you cannot be serious!!!
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HELP! I’ve really been struggling with lesson 23 & now 24. I’ve not progressed well in 2 weeks. Im still having huge trouble with ‘sydd’ which seems to be used for a number of English words depending on context and I seldom come up with the right usage! I had a sentence where the Cymraeg for ‘let’ was ‘gadael’…which I thought was leave and struggled to get my head round…and at some point I was told that ‘when’ was ‘pryd’ although previously I had only used ‘pan’. I looked it up in my Modern Welsh and it gives examples of sentences with ‘pryd’ or ‘pan’ and one is adverb & one is conjunction and I can’t even understand the difference or think of how to put my sentences together without all these blinking different words used for the same thing in a different context!!! HUGE GRUMBLE about how HARD this actually is at the moment…I’m just putting it out there!
There’s no way I will give up…I’ve come too far, but I’ve not struggled as much as this before. Someone tell me to man up, get a grip and stop whingeing!!
I’m not sure i could say man up or get a grip. More like relax you are not alone.
if you think of pan on i’n gwneud rhywbeth (when i was doing something) as a statement you will be fine.
Think of ‘pryd’ as having a question mark over it ‘pryd ^?’ . pryd is when as a question.
Yeh, it’s something we don’t differentiate in English and i still have to think first before using it.
Cheers J.P.
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That’s really helpful John. Diolch yn fawr iawn.
My grandmother always used to use “leave” in this context in English – “Leave me go” “Leave him talk” and so on. So when I encounter this in Welsh I always think of her.
I think there must be some underlying semantic connection between these two concepts that I can’t quite put my finger on. In German they are “lassen” and “verlassen”, obviously connected, though not identical.
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That’s really helpful too Jeff! Diolch yn fawr iawn.
Firstly let’s say i like ‘sydd yn’ just because it sounds nice to me. shortening to ‘sy’n’ somehow loses a bit of the magic (for me).
(bare in mind, i’m writing of the top of my head so mistakes are likely and i’m more than happy to be corrected).
Sydd, seems to me something in the area of which/who’m and just doesn’t map to English squarely.
Dw i’n nabod rhywun sydd yn medru (gallu) gwneud o. i know someone who’m/which is able to do it. (that works quite nicely in English).
pwy sydd (reads as who who’m) does not fit with English yet i seem to remember it somewhere in course.
Pwy sydd yn mynd i neud o - who is going to do it.
(i worry far more about this grammar/spelling stuff in Welsh than ever i would in English).
Cheers J.P.
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I think that 2laeve2 is used in just the same way in English. A court can give you leave to appeal and a soldier can go home on leave. I think in the second example the word is denoting permission, rather than departure from barracks.
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*“leave” !
Thanks John that does help a bit. I have heard sydd yn or just sydd or pwy sydd, seemingly in place of who, or as you say also used for ‘which’. I get confused whether I will need pwy alone, pwy sydd, or sydd alone. Sydd used as who throws me. In one sentence the LAST word was sydd. I cant remember the exact sentence but basically the sydd was used at the very end for the word ‘is’. I really can’t think now what it was but for e.g it was like ‘he isn’t looking after the child but she is.’ ( I can’t actually remember the particular sentence, I’d have to go through again to find it, but it seemed to be that kind of construction). It seems unwise to get ‘hung up’ on the grammar, and I try not to be, but in the last couple of lessons I find that not understanding where to use this word really trips me up. I really appreciate your help and it does reassure me to find that things I struggle with have been the exact things others struggled a bit with too.
Actually “sydd” is a form of “bod”, which is “to be” So your instinct that it means “is” is correct here. It is really serving this purpose in all the other sentences where you encounter it, but that may not be obvious because we structure some phrases differently in English. Stick with it and it will make more sense over time.
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Thanks again Jeff. I do realise I just need exposure, exposure, exposure and will slowly but surely find that I know when to use it and when it ‘sounds right’…i just wish i knew now!
“leave” to allow, permit, ‘let’!!
also, lacking neuter, Cymraeg cannot differentiate ‘which’ and ‘who’, I would imagine! I know ‘it’ is usually ‘he’!!
And, to my friend Ramblingjohn, you exactly have Aran’s point about grammar, we don’t even think about it unless writing a formal paper or letter, so why fret about it in Cymraeg??? (Mind, I used to have disagreements with an English teacher on the subject of ‘style’ v ‘grammatical error’!!)
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Yes and no 
In English, ‘who’ and ‘which’ and its friend ‘what’ have two very different uses, one is the relative pronoun (e.g. the man who saw you) and the other the interrogative pronoun (e.g. who did this? which way to the north?). In Welsh, there is no relative pronoun (well there is sometimes, but not to worry), e.g. y dyn sydd yn yr ardd - the man who is in the garden
But for questions, “pwy” matches “who”, and “pa” matches “what” or “which”, e.g. [quote=“ramblingjohn, post:88, topic:2281”]
Pwy sydd yn mynd i neud o - who is going to do it.
[/quote]
Pa anifail sydd yn yr ardd? What animal is in the garden?
I forgot to add that “sydd” is used in both situations.
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This looks like a perfect example of why my understanding of grammar is still a wall of mist, (well that’s my excuse).
Now your talking, thanks very much, examples i can learn from.
This really is a great and helpful forum.
Cheers J.P.
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It’s normal to find the lessons towards the end of a course trickier, because you’re revisiting more material. But what you say about ‘not progressing well’ concerns me a little - does that mean you’re hammering away at repeating 23 and 24 over and over again?
If so, I strongly recommend that you stop that process immediately! Move on to 25, then go and do some vocabs (if you’re on the Courses, or just move on to the next level if you’re on the Levels) - and then come back and run through 23 and 24 again in a month or so
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Many thanks to you all for your kind, helpful and patient efforts to explain the enigma that is the usage of ‘sydd’ and also other vagaries of Cymraeg currently causing me to stall somewhat. I say ‘stall’ because I’ve not struggled this much previously. Lesson 24 is so hard I haven’t got many of my responses right to be honest. Aran, it appears I exaggerated when I said not much progress in 2 weeks, as when I look back at this thread I see I had just started lesson 20 on July 14…so, in the 2 weeks since I’ve got up to 24. I am just used to feeling a lot more comfortable with it before moving on. I’m not ‘getting’ quite a bit of 24! Anyway I will take your advice and press on through 25 and onto the vocabs…I’m hoping things will drop into place. Can’t believe I’ve nearly finished Course 2 Northern!
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And less than 4 months ago you were wondering if you were too old to ever be ‘reasonably fluent’. End of course 2 Northern. I think you’ve answered your own question. Da iawn a phob lwc.
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@4Ruth - what everybody else said, plus, if it helps to remember that “pryd” usually implies or actually asks a question, there is a handy expression - “ers pryd?” which directly translates to the English “since when?”
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