J is a consonant in Swedish, even though it sounds very similar to English y. so hej is /e/ followed by a consonantal /y/-sound.
Hallå and hem don’t contain any sounds that could be thought of as diphthongs; if they were Welsh they would be spelt halô and hem.
In many ways, Welsh pronunciation is quite easy for me (I can roll my r’s), except for LL and those pesky diphthongs!
Ah great thanks. So, you are pronouncing them as pure vowels, not like Geordie “Hallo~a” and “Hyem”?
No, they’re definitely pure vowels.
Having said that, there are dialects that have diphthongs (especially Gutnish, on the island of Gotland), but I don’t speak one of them.
Both ‘dd’ and ‘f’ are sounds in English, my mother tongue, but during the lessons I occasionally mishear them. During a challenge or two, I broke the rule of “don’t look at the words until you’ve finished the lesson” because of this. I once paused to see how “ddiddorol” was spelled, because its pronunciation kept eluding me somehow.
“Dw i” is often shortened into “dwi”. In the shortened form, it’s converted into one syllable and ‘w’ becomes a consonant.
I can’t roll my Rs. Probably doesn’t help that I wasn’t sure exactly how the sound was formed, and kept making guesses at it. With the Welsh ‘LL’, on the other hand, I actually read stuff on how it’s formed, so my attempts don’t sound like a horrible parody. (No one wants to hear some of my worst attempts at a rolled R.)
I have a son who’s really into linguistics and very good at phonology, but even with his explanations it took me ages to get a (hopefully) decent LL sound, and it’s still quite an effort, I have to kind of prepare myself for it… And since I don’t know any Welsh speakers in real life, I never get any practice!
As for the rolled r, try saying tedee-tedee-tedee faster and faster; it should eventually sound like tree with a rolled r. At least, that’s how the speech therapist taught my younger sister to do a rolled r when she was 12. It might not work for English speakers, though…
Ah, that tdtd makes sense. For me though your “tree” or just “trio” was the way I grasped it.
In fairness after a few years (pre-SSiW) of trying to get the Ll sound, I swallowed my pride and got our next door neighbours’ granddaughter to teach me. That, and stopping myself from trying too hard, when I read that it’s not supposed to be a sharp sound.
Perhaps, sit in front of a video demo and replay a few times.
Hello, it’s me again. Can I just ask about words beginning with swy- gwy- etc.
The general principle seems to be that the first vowel of the wy/yw combinations is more stressed than the second, although they are both supposed to be pronounced as vowels (which, as per my original post, is what I struggle to accept!). Does this apply even to words like swydd and gwych? My brain is screaming to pronounce them /swidd/ and /gwich/, rather than /soo-idd/ and /goo-ich/ - i.e. with the same initial sound as English swift and gwi- (OK, I don’t think there are any English words beginning with gwi-).
Comments?
According to Wiktionary, ‘swydd’ is pronounced with the ‘oo-ee’ sound, while ‘gwych’ is pronounced with the ‘wih’ sound.
Dang it, now you’ve got me trying to think of words starting with ‘gwi-’. I finally gave up and tried looking some up. A few examples I found are:
Gwiduc- less common spelling variant of ‘geoduck’.
Gwich’in- member of a North American Indian people from northwest Canada and northeast Alaska, or the language of these people.
Gwine- present part. of ‘go’. (Apparently an Southern US colloquialism, but I’m not familiar with it.)
Really, most of the examples I found on Dictionary.com are geographical names or borrowings from other tongues.
Sorry to have distracted you like that! 
But if you’re right and those two words are actually pronounced (slightly) differently, I will not be happy… That would mean I really have to start listening to real native speakers in real life! 
Hmm… I don’t think that I pronounce swydd and gwych all that differently. Hmmm…
In the past I started putting dipthongs together by just pronouncing each letter’s sound in succession, and then speeding it up until I could make a smooth transition quickly. That usually gave me the correct sound in the end, though not always. But it would be understood anyway.
Yes, that’s what I’m trying to do as well. It would just be nice to know that I’m doing it more or less correctly! I’ve realised that I struggle to look things up in dictionaries if I can’t “say” the word in my head, and I can’t say it if I’m confused by the diphthongs…
The moral of this whole thread is obviously that I should just listen to Welsh speakers more! 
Absolutely! 
You might find these videos helpful (if the link doesn’t work, just go to YouTube and type “Dial D for Dipthongs” in the search box)
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Dial+D+for+Dipthongs
Thanks! There doesn’t seem to be one for yw / wy, though, but it’s always helpful hearing spoken Welsh.
Me too! Still happens all the time, after finishing Level 3!
However one of the things that I really appreciate of Welsh language is that being a phonetic language it’s much easier for people to understand what you want to say even if you don’t pronounce it exactly as it should.
I 've always pronounced everything like Italian (apart from LL which I had to learn, and th and dd that I copy from English and y that’s sometimes a bit more “closed”).
And people understands just fine!
English is way more complicated, so if you can manage to make yourself understood as a non-native English speaker, always keep in mind that Welsh is much easier in this sense.
So if learning the tiny differences is part of your fun of learning a new language, that’s great.
Otherwise, I’d say you can just relax and copy what you hear and nuances will naturally come with time and practice.
Here’s one for wy
and yw is in this one:
Thanks! That confirmed that they’re not always pronounced the same… which is what I suspected but was hoping wasn’t true. (Assuming it’s the same in the South, as that was clearly a northern accent.)
But now I can’t get my head around the uw sound… 