Hi there peoples. Just looking for a bit of love/support if possible? I have been slowly doing SSiW but finding it a bit strange not having any grammar explanations at all, as am a grammarian. I decided to enroll on an evening class for total beginners, thinking that well, couldn’t go wrong there. Unfortunately the evening class has totally discouraged me. The tutor seemed arrogant and kept making jokes and references to things I didn’t understand (in English that is) which everyone else got but me. She was speeding ahead and again, everyone but me seemed to be following it very well, whereas I got totally mixed up, again because there was not any explanation of what the words actually meant, and how the sentences fit together, plus the others seemed to already understand a lot more Welsh than me… complete beginners? She showed us a bizarre video all about mutations that wouldn’t have made sense probably to most Welsh speakers let alone Englsih total beginners Anyway, apologies for being negative, I’m just really sad that I’ve had this experience as though I thought I was doing ok, saying my phone number for example when I’ve only just learned the numbers I was getting no encouragement and the whole attitude has rather put me off learning Welsh at all… I need a big cwtch please to get me back on track if I may? I really want to persevere with SSiW but now I feel like a thick dunce compared to others.
Oh dear. All classes have people who learn at different speeds. I am sure that you will find a place here, right @aran 
What a shame @Frances
Can I ask how far you have progressed with SSiW? My recommendation to you is to persevere with the SSW material - and if your addiction to grammar becomes too much, get hold of a few books on Welsh grammar. We have a member on the forum who has published a few…
Classroom environments often discourage people, because there is always someone you think is smarter than you - although it should never be the case that the tutor makes you feel inadequate…
I am only on lesson four. I just can’t seem to get through it. I’m getting very mixed up. I am feeling very discouraged by trying to learn Welsh, looks like I’ve picked the most difficult language in the world 
sounds so beautiful but goodness me, not sure I will ever speak it . I am a very clever person but i am not good at following spoken instructions. I’ve always been a bit slow like that I think I have some slight dyslexia/dyspraxia. Having started ssiw I am not used to reading Welsh and all the pages of strange looking words that look like someone sat on the w and y key was doing my brain in. (no offence meant here buy ydy wdy etc do look odd at first… ) When she started talking about mutations and said breezily “well you don’t need to learn all 30 of them yet…” in a semi serious way I was a bit put out. I have taught English as a Foreign language to complete beginners and I’d never go as fast as that or frighten people by introducing a scary concept early on, after all mutations are totally odd to the English mind, I want to know why they happen from a linguistic perspective to help me understand them. I can’t learn things by rote. Thanks for your encouragement
They happen because in natural flowing speech, the ending of one word/morphene and the beginning of the next influence each other, and that is the case in all spoken languages. In Welsh this has been codified in the written language, and therefore mutations have taken on a life of their own, more or less. There is more to the story, but this is the gist of it.
For example, the English ‘input’ is usually pronounced as ‘imput’, because of the position your lips need to be in for the ‘p’. And in Portuguese, the word for ‘input’ word is actually ‘imput’
In SSiW, you don’t learn learn mutations as a concept, but you learn the patterns, almost without realising - and that works really well, at least for me. Also, it is not illegal nor embarrasing to make mistakes 
- so persevere!
Well, if you think of Cymraeg as a fast-spoken language with a lilt and a flow to it when it is spoken fluently; the mutations might make more sense to you. That is how I see them. Sometimes the ‘g’ needs to go to God in order for the music to stay in the language.
Think of how magical your first flowing sentence will be when you hit that on auto-pilot! The work comes before the flow…like Ballet, martial arts ballroom dancing or calisthenics. 
Thanks for your reply. You see I’ve studied phonetics. The Welsh mutations don’t clearly follow that pattern. There is a clear reason in English due to the position of the tongue or whether the sound is voiced or voiceless.I have transcribed lots of English into phonetic symbols and am very aware of how articulation can effect following sounds. I’ve actually looked for that pattern in the Welsh mutations and it doesn’t follow. Particularly where somethings like P mutate to B and other things beginning with B mutate to something else following yn for example, so that doesn’t make sense, if it was a natural thing then only the P would mutate to B and the things beginning with B would stay the same. This is why I am confused. lol I’m glad it’s not illegal to make mistakes or the heddlu would lock me up for sure!
I don’t think I am quite esoteric enough to understand that. Maybe I should learn German instead lol. There has to be a reason for everything though? I mean, the system of mutations seems fixed and well documented and thought out so therefore it’s not just something that’s coming with the flow of a language being spoken fast. I’m no good at any of the things you mentioned. I am good at singing, playing guitar, writing fiction, non fiction, and attracting squirrels and pigeons to my side. That last one is the nearest thing to a magical flow I think… I also like gazing over the Bristol Channel at Caerdydd which I can see on the other side. Think I might borrow a donkey and swim across on his back. Diolch.
Whatever did I say? Louis had the right of it. There are reasons, and they will clear up in time. Perhaps it is best to let @garethrking hop in when he wakes up. I don’t wish my poor efforts to discourage you when the opposite was intended.
Ym Mangor, for example, from ‘yn Bangor’? Same thing
But if you are looking for logic in the mutations, that is not always there. Loss of word initial ‘g’ for instance, if my memory serves me right, that may have something to do with Welsh losing its voiced velar fricative ‘ɣ’, possibly because it became an ‘h’ glottal fricative - this is happening now in Flemish dialects, e.g. in Ghent. My cousins say ‘hoed’ instead of proper like ‘goed’
Sorry to hear you have been discouraged Helwn. Lots of people go to evening classes for years and are still unable to speak Welsh and if you try to think of the correct mutation before you speak you’d never utter a word.
We all develop an interest in grammar to various degrees and need things explained as you will see on the various posts on this forum. Invest in a good dictionary and grammar book for beginners where you can look things up as they appear on the course.
I would go with the flow in SSIW and look up the queries as they appear or ask here on the forum where there are some really helpful people. I don’t know how far you are with the course but when you are in Level two perhaps read some learners books.
It can be very discouraging being in a class where you don’t feel you’re achieving despite all your efforts.
Hope you will soon be able to enjoy your Welsh, Pob lwc.
Keep going with SSiW would be my advise. You can do it at your own pace, on your own, and sat in the living room with a cup of tea 
With regard to mutations, I really wouldn’t worry about them - they come eventually without thought. I literally don’t know anything about verbs/adjectives and all that sorta stuff and can do the mutations more often than not now just by accepting them at face value. We do have mutations in English, we just down write them on a page, now do we even realise we are doing them (knife/knives etc). Just like a 5yo first language welsh speaker, I doubt they even know why or realise that they are saying “bawb” instead of “pawb”. @Nicky has a really great video on his channel about them, which I can’t find at the moment, but it helped me loads.
Main thing though: keep on keeping on, it’ll be worth the effort 
I feel some of your pain. I really do. I am a grammarian too and in the early days, I was always coming onto the forum and asking questions that were basically just ’ but why???’.
But here’s the thing with the SSiW method. The way I think of it is that they have broken the language down into little bits like lego blocks. And then they show you lots and lots of ways of putting the blocks back together. And after a while, your brain starts to work out - ‘oh, I can put the blue block with the yellow one like this, but if I add the red block, I have to twist it round like this…’ Just the way children acquire language without consciously learning the rules.
Yes, your conscious mind will still want to ask questions. And if it does, you can buy a couple of books and look up the answers. And it may well help make some of the things you’ve found particularly tricky stick a little better ( it did for me).
But in the meantime if you can relax and enjoy the ride, and as Aran always says, stop worrying that you might be getting things wrong, then the SSiW process is a little bit of magic, letting you learn in a way you probably haven’t since the day you started school!
And this forum will always be here to support you too
Here’s the infamous video…
That publisher still hates my guts!
I hope this isn’t going to come across as flipant, I really don’t mean it to, but could I ask you @Frances - you say you’re good at guitar, but did you feel you needed to know every single note and chord and scale and finger position and musical notation before you were able to play well? Or did you learn in smaller chunks and learn how to fit notes together as a natural progression, and practice mutating your fingers into different chord positions until muscle memory took over and you could do it almost without thinking?
Surely learning the smaller chunks is like Catriona’s lego analogy and consciously thinking about why fingers go where is like consciously worrying about mutations?
I am fascinated by grammar but I’m not a grammarian (same thing with maths really, too! ) so I was happy to learn the grammar as I went along (and even now I wouldn’t say I’ve learnt it all - which is why I keep several grammar books, including Gareth King’s, near my desk at home to help people with queries!), but I know from helping on this forum that there are lots of people who find it very difficult to not have grammar rules from the start and that the SSiW method can feel very counter-intuitive, but it does turn people who can’t speak Welsh into people who can, no doubt about that. The reading, writing and nitty-gritty abilities do come along the more you stick with it, so my best advice would be to try and curb your inner grammarian for a while and then let it loose again once you are further along - the light-bulb moments will happen!
I should have thought of that…but I’m not so good on the guitar yet lol
This, admittedly, is a phenomenal comparison - that I will clearly steal for my own usage in the future
No problem Nicky, glad it works! I think I can say with confidence that I’m better at using a guitar in an analogy than I am at using a guitar.
And actually, me trying to learn guitar (I have tried several times ) is spookily comparative to what we see many Welsh learners struggle with - in one respect I couldn’t shake the ‘want’ to know too much too soon and that frustration made practicing a chore so of of course I practised less and less, and in another, somewhat contrary, respect the very excellent guitarists that tried to teach me always seemed to be speeding ahead and I just couldn’t ‘get’ what they were on about.
But after all, it is said that music is a universal language, so it shouldn’t really be a surprise that we can draw a few linguistic parallels!
So true. A bit like me dabbling at learning the accordion. There’s a load of unmarked chord buttons, which dont seem to match the official tutor books. So I just push any of them until I find one that matched the keyboard melody. Very annoying for the neighbours but better than my singing.
I suppose what I’m saying is that the main thing is the sound of it , rather than a perfect knowledge. That’s how I go in Welsh also.
This suggests to me that you might be what we refer to as a ‘higher repetition learner’ - which has some implications for how you use the course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZRwMXyNxT8
The key points - first, make sure that you use the pause button as much as you need to - better to go at a more comfortable pace, and say something in EVERY gap (without worrying too much about whether it’s right or not) than to rush through without pausing.
Second, how often are you repeating the sessions? When you’ve done Challenge 5, revisit Challenge 1 - if it feels noticeably easier, then the pattern of repetition you’re already following is fine, and you should carry on like that. If you revisit Challenge 1 and it feels just about as hard as it did the first time, then you’ll need to add some extra repetitions - but I’d strongly recommend that you do them on the pattern 1,2,3,4,5,1,2,3,4,5 rather than 11111122222 etc…