Thank you. One day I would like to be able to hear and transcribe that much detail. At the moment I listen to and enjoy the programme, letting the gist of it was over me, catching the subject matter, spotting ssiw structures, words jumping out at me which I look up, then listening again to catch further understanding and detail. Comparing what I hear and understand is rather interesting in that I do understand much even though I now see I’m only catching a fraction of the actual content.
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Hi Steve
I’ve finished course 3 and have been attending welsh classes at the same time. I would definitely recommend sylfaen. You will know a fair bit of it but not all. SSIW is excellent but no course will get you anywhere near true fluency. For that, you need to take on a tonne of vocab and get out there talking to people regularly. I have found that doing a class alongside the ssiw courses is a useful combination. They really compliment each other. You could jump straight to canolradd but personally I have found going through the classes from mynediad onwards to be worthwhile.
Can only repeat what PollyPolly has said, have listened to last Saturdays sound file three times now and it’s getting better but not good enough.
cheers J.P.
Not sure what Aran would think about this as I seem to remember on one lesson we were advised not to read as we might mispronounce the words. But having finished Course 3 I am now reading a book I was bought for Christmas. It is designed for relative beginners (not complete beginners, mind you). It’s called “Sgwp!” (Scoop), and it’s author is Lois Arnold.
Obviously, I am heavily reliant on an online translator for a lot of it, but it’s really interesting now doing some proper reading. It’s very enjoyable.
Anyone read this book or have any other book suggestions?
Diolch, pawb!
Haven’t read that one, but Lois Arnold has written another great intro book called “e-Ffrindiau” which might be worth a look. It’s written as a series of emails between a couple of Welsh leaners, and the difficulty of the emails increases as the book goes on. That’s where I started about a year ago. After that I moved on to a mix of children’s books (the pictures help explain the text) and a series called “Stori Sydyn” (Quick reads) which is designed for Welsh language adults who haven’t done much reading. There’s a lot of variety in the series and I picked up a lot of vocab from them. After that the world / library / Amazon is your oyster.
Like you, I resisted reading for a good while because it’s so important to persist with the SSiW approach, but being a reader / writer by instinct, the urge to dive into books became stronger and stronger until I finally had to give in. At first I felt like I was doing crossword puzzles with language rather than reading for pleasure, but then, even crossword puzzles can be interesting 
Slowly the vocab builds and it becomes more and more fun and more and more natural. Now I’m starting to get an urge to write in Welsh which I guess is the next logical step for me - people are getting all sorts of badly written texts and emails from me at the moment!
I guess the only partially negative side I’ve found is that knowing a word in writing is not the same as knowing it when it’s spoken so I still find myself consciously having to relearn words from my reading vocabulary to put them into my hearing / speaking vocabulary (if that makes sense) - is that a negative? Probably not.
Lastly, if Google translate is your friend, then have a look at bliubliu.com as a way of getting easy on-the-fly translation for a lot of Welsh language blogs.
Mwynhewch!
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S’mae Jason?
The Blodwen Jones series of books is a good start. The stories are amusing and there is some vocab listed at the bottom of every couple of pages. I found that it was slow going reading this book to begin with, with liberal use of a dictionary (paper sort), but by the time I got to the end, I was only needing o use the dictionary rarely. As Steve says, the vocab takes a lot more work to make it stick in your active memory for conversational use, but it does get there eventually (even if you need to refresh it every now and again). You also get some fun idioms and expressions to toss into the mix.
There is also a range of short books by Bob Eynon in various genres, from Western to Sci-Fi, and all in between. These are accessible and fun too.
Personally, I could not continue with learner’s books for very long. These days, I read teen books such as the Alecs Rider teenage spy series. These contain a lot more new vocab and are structured much more like regular novels, and are well-written to boot. There are plenty of teen books to choose from as well.
I have also got a book called Sybrydion o Andromeda that it is my aim to read in 2015. Its a book for adults, so is a bit of a step up, but being about UFOs, will hold my interest. That’s pretty key actually - you need to be interested in the subject matter once the initial reading challenge eases. At first, you read it because its in Welsh and its good for you, but after a while you need that interest to keep you going.
Pob lwc,
Stu