Is it just me misremembering, or were there courses through the medium of languages other than English before? I seem to remember there were, but now the little pop up list on the front page only gives “English” as an option for “I speak”. I’m looking to see if I can find something suitable for a Bilingual (actually a lot more than bilingual!) linguist parent and their Spanish speaking child (six years). Who for reasons I’ve mentioned elsewhere, are learning Welsh. Because of the situation with their hearing, the parent can’t do audio courses (but she is a linguist who has learned many languages). I thought a Welsh through Spanish course might be useful for them to do together, but I can’t seem to find any non-English medium courses? I might be just making it up, it’s been a fair few years since I visited this forum/site.
There used to be an (incomplete) Spanish through the medium of Welsh one. I think I downloaded all the mp3s before it vanished, but that’s not really what you’re looking for, anyway. If you look through the thread on new courses here, you’ll see that Welsh through the medium of Spanish should hopefully be available relatively soon:
Thanks. Wow, things have changed. It’s using AI ChatGPT translation to provide other courses? The whole thing that made SSiW so good for me was the way I could rely on it, more than any other source, to provide me with the natural way of speaking, down to “north” vs “south”. I would assume that GPT translate wouldn’t do that. As a linguist and someone interested in smaller languages she said in particular that she is trying not to use online translations, and seems to want to get the language from native speakers in particular. I’ll run it by her if and when it comes out, but it looks to me like this wouldn’t be for her after all - and I’ve got to say I would understand if it isn’t. [Unless the Spanish to Welsh course simply translated the English part to Spanish through AI and kept the natural, native Welsh. That wouldn’t be as good as “native speakers both ends”, but it would be almost as good, I would think.] But as I say, thank you for the link.
Am I missing something here? Couldn’t anyone just use ChatGPT themselves? Cut out the middleman, as it were? As I say, she’s trying not to do that - but is perfectly capable of doing it. Doing it for Spanish to Welsh might be of use for her son - I could run it past her, as an idea.
Well, I think that for the Welsh, seeing as they have all the good-quality audio, and TTS for Welsh is probably not great, they probably are going to keep the natural audio & marry them together. You might need @aran for a definitive take on that, though.
It’s not so much the natural audio or text to speech which worries me- it’s the words themselves. It’s best to have the pronunciation from a native speaker, but it’s easily as important to have the natural words. To even have two dialects, from fluent Welsh speakers who use Welsh naturally was a game changer in my experience. I can’t imagine GPT arguing with itself (in the nicest way) about which word way was the most natural in the way of Aran and Iestyn! Their voices are great - but the two of them took people on a journey in speaking Welsh because they do speak Welsh, because they do it naturally, because I knew I could rely on them to be teaching me natural, fluent, Welsh. How could you do that with ChatGPT?
I take the point entirely - but I think you’ll find that for Welsh (partly because of the tools currently available, partly because it’s their main focus) and for some other smaller languages that they specifically would like to support (eg all the other Celtic languages) there will have to be some measure of human involvement: the fully automated approach that promises to allow the expansion of the course approach to bigger languages ain’t gonna happen. I think you’re still going to have the option of llaeth vs llefrith for a long time yet.
It’s nowhere near just as simple as eg llaeth vs llefrith - it’s about being a course which you can recommend someone to pay out money for. It’s about having fluent, natural speakers of the language producing what is being taught. If AI produces courses in other languages, the course approach won’t be expanded - there will simply be shadowy AI created imitations of reality, of the real course. As someone who produces audiobooks, I’ve noticed there are an awful lot of AI produced books flooding the market at the moment - translations, stuff written to a theme, quickly made- but shadowy imitations, not good. The way they are thought of is - well, as something to steer clear of. That people should not be asking money for them. The idea of an AI produced course reminds me of this. And if the same money is to be asked for such courses, it’s not a good look.
We’ll continue to do very careful QA checking, but AI generated translations for languages with large enough LLMs is already startlingly good - ChatGPT 4.5, Gemini etc - or we wouldn’t be doing it. And we can fine tune it as much as we want, towards or away from the colloquial - and of course we can produce far, far more content. We’re expecting to do some iterations as we get user feedback, but these courses are going to be better than the old Welsh ones, not worse 
“Startlingly” good is a comparative term, and also inaccurate, at least with regards to myself - it doesn’t startle me, I’ve had experience of their results. A lot of experience of it. So I’m no longer startled by it. But whether such stuff produced by AI is as good as that produced by a fluent speaker or not is the question. And they aren’t. You aren’t going to replace yourself and Iestyn in the Welsh course, and that’s because you are better than AI produced stuff, not because of your charming personalities and lovely voices (though both are true of both of you, of course!) And charging someone for money for a course that AI has produced doesn’t look good. It’s gift wrapping something that AI has produced, which I’ve seen in a lot of places - and like a lot of people, I find that more uncomfortable than AI itself. And the advantages of SSiW with yourself and Iestyn are so much more than that which can be provided by AI translation . So much more. But of course AI can produce more content than people can - that’s obvious in many fields. The point is it isn’t as good. It is good that it will be there for everyone to use. Simply using google translate has been helping people to learn languages for some time now. Absolutely it is a marvellous tool. Freely available to all. But you can’t rely on it. You and Iestyn aren’t infallible popes, but I would rely on you a hell of a lot more than any AI produced translation.