Excellent - looking forward to that - interested in the stats, but also interested in your emotions on the re-run…
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Progress log - Challenge 3 again
Sorry for the late update, but I had a rather intense weekend. Anyway, here are my stats when revisiting Challenge 3:
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54 hits
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17 errors
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34 misses
That compares to 24 hits, 32 errors and 54 misses that I recorded the first time. A definite improvement there.
@aran asked me about my emotions on the re-run, and they were a strange mixture. On the one hand, I was quite pleased to get a lot of them right. As @aran suggested, I also count the numbers in the ‘errors’ category as successes, and so I had nearly a ratio of 2 to 1 ‘positives’ to ‘negatives’.
On the other hand, I still get negative emotions for the many misses I have. After heaving heard some of these phrases over a hundred times, they still don’t seem to stick in my mind at all. However, I’d rate my experience with this challenge as positive overall.
I will give a more detailed report on my thoughts and current state later today.
Cheers, Michael
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Assume that you are a runner and you want to get faster. You look up ways to improve and find some training regime that you try to follow. But you soon find out that this regime was geared towards much better runners than you are, and you find yourself falling more and more behind to what you should achieve according to plan. After a while you test your running speed and find a definite improvement, but not as much as you might have hoped for, considering the effort and pain you put in. This is how I feel after having completed the 10 challenges in a row.
Doing those 10 challenges in a row with no repeats (actually, they were only 8 in a row - Challenges 3 to 10) was quite an unpleasant experience overall. The last few challenges did not feel like I learned anything from them at all, even though they were quite exhausting. Then stepping back to Challenge 3, there was a definite improvement, but nothing spectacular. Overall, my case does not support the claim that this is the most effective way to learn Welsh.
I have noticed, that new words tend to fall into two categories. Some words seem to ‘stick’ after they were introduced. Even if I may not be able to recall them immediately after the lesson, they have reached a threshold where repetition improves my memory of them. Other words did not reach that threshold after a challenge. I may have had a hundred intermittent repetitions of Challenge 1’s ‘I need to…’ but that did not improve my recall of it at all.
@aran suggested that I seem to need more repetitions than average before I learn something, and I tend to agree. This may be the reason why I did so poorly with a huge part of the vocabulary.
Another point I have noticed is that half hour challenges are very demanding for me. I find myself tired and unable to fully concentrate towards the end of a challenge.
In conclusion, I do not think that this is the best learning system for me. However, not much may be missing for it to become that. My current plan is to experiment with some variations and see how I fare. I have some ideas on how to change the system to become more effective for me. I would love to hear @aran’s and the forum member’s opinions on those ideas.
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Breaking up the challenges into two or three parts and taking them with breaks in between them.
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Repeating challenges - not until I can recall all the new words but until I feel that most of the new words have ‘stuck’, i.e. reached that threshold I have mentioned above.
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As a variant of the point above, I could try to repeat just the parts of a challenge that introduce the words that did not reach the ‘stuck’ threshold.
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10 challenges in a row without repeats was torture. I may be able to live with 5 instead of 10.
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Introduce addional material. Maybe a Memrise course could provide synergies with this one?
Cheers, Michael
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Hello @Eigentime
I’m not @aran and I know you’d like to hear his opinion first but since I have read this with some urge to do so despite being at work, I just am gathering my thoughts until they’re still fresh and don’t escape my mind.
First of all: as I see the thing, you’ve made huge improvement on repeating Challenge 3 what really is a success and you (even if you’d be too eager to do that) can’t deny that. I’m glad for this but I am not glad you’re still feeling negative in general about the learning process. My feeling is you have really too high expectations about learning languages. I had them too, but your’s are really much higher then there were mine. Sorry, I don’t want to sound rude, but did you think that you’ll just run through the lesson and you’ll have it all? No one, even the best learners here don’t get this. I thought almost the similar when I started, I have to be honest and admit that, but you might feel much better to lower your expectations just a bit. Even if you don’t admit, you’re quite beating yourself because of you can’t learn as fast and efficiently as you think you should or as some others might seam to do. I did drop my expectations and stopped to beat myself and I don’t regret.
Your ideas seam quite OK to me except maybe that about other resources. They’re great at one point but if you stick to one course it might not be good to go with them at the very beginning (and 10 challenges actually is quite a very beginning though). But, if you go with Memrise, you might do your own memory course for your private use based on what you can’t actually cope with in the lessons. You set your “course” to include a lot of speaking/listening and a bit of writing if you remember things this way better. (for writing properly there are guides to the lessons and challenges to give you some aid). You can also create the same thing with Anki cards (if you use them maybe) and learn at your pace.
Many people learnt the way of spliting challenges to more parts and did them in certain amount of time breaks. So you definatelly can go for it.
Repeating - if it doesn’t go other way, why not? Do whatever it’s better for you. Doing 10 challenges in a row is usually Aran’s way of testing the abilities and success rate one is really doing because when you learn you sometimes don’t have the feeling you are actually going somewhere toward success but trained mind of Aran and him alike can spot really quickly what’s the real thing behind the scene. So, if you feel frustrated with no repetition, I’d say go for it but don’t let them stop you from getting further in the course. 10 times repetition is not good either, believe me. I’ve gone through all this already and I have no doubt many more others too.
So, to yuor plan of learning I’d add
- lower expectations a bit and
- not beating yourself too much
This should do.
Maybe you should try the very much tested method of remembering things on here - talking to yourself. Try to compose some sentences with what you’ve already learnt and they don’t need to be the structures from the lessons. If you succeed in that, then you definately are learning, because you actually are able to speak if even a tiny amount of language.
Dal ati nawr! You can do it! I’m sure and I believe even if you don’t!
Heyl!
Tatjana
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Thank you Tatjana for your reply. I very much value your opinion, and I am grateful that you took the time to respond.
There are two different aspects about my expectations. One is the ‘local’ view, where I evaluate a challenge after I’ve done it. There, I can not help but feel bad when I hardly get anything right. This may be a character flaw.
The other aspect is a more global view. @aran 's claim is that doing 10 challenges in a row and then going back is a more effective system. This is an extraordinary claim and would need extraordinary evidence, which I do not see judging from my experience.
As a baseline, I know that I can easily learn 100 items in about 3 hours. So just by rote learning I could by now have built a vocabulary of about 200 words. Of course, I know that this is quite different from being able to communicate, but it still feels that I have relatively little to show for ~6 hours work.
What I like about @aran 's system is, that it offers more than just words and phrases, but ultimately a way of understanding a language. That is why I continued so far. I just do not believe that doing 10 challenges in a row was the best thing for me.
Anki cards is definitely an interesting option. Thanks for the tip.
And for not beating myself up too much, well, I may not be able to stop .
Cheers, Michael
Hello @Elgentime - @aran 's claim of doing 10 lessons in a row and then going back is very effective. It is worth trying.
Keep going!
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It seems like @tatjana beat me to almost everything I wanted to say, including:
- Pointing out that you have made massive progress
- Suggesting using Anki (if you’ve got the patience you could even snip up the SSi challenges because Anki can use audio instead of text if you want - I’ve actually been wondering whether to suggest something like that to @aran as a future direction for SSi)
So as being as pretty much all of it has been said already, I’ll just add well done for what you have done so far 
.
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Thank you. You have so similar diffilcuties to those I had that I’m really eager you succeed at the end and become a Welsh speaker without too much more problems. I’m always here to help if I can.
O, yes, I know this part and I won’t lie if I say that the frustration grabbs me even now, after 4 years of learning and almost all material done but I always tend to remember this doesn’t help much but rather makes the things worse and more unbearable and I more or less manage to go further into new challenges.
There’s another one: "Do the whole course without repetition and pause button and then re-do the Challenge 25 (the final Challenge) once a month. It’s good of the revision which doesn’t give you immediate feeling of great success but in time you just realize at one point that it is rewarding. Maybe here are your expectations too high.
I bet you don’t actually realize how much you can already say because you didn’t try your knowledge “in the wild” yet. And besides - 6 hours work … hmmmm … There are a lot of hours of work behind me + bootcamp + speaking in the wild, tweeting, writing letters etc, etc, but if one would really listen ot me talking that one would be less satisfied with my knowledge then I am. You are actually lucky you’ve started with new Levels. I’ve started with old Courses where short forms are introduced only in Course 3. Now I (still) have quite big problems using them instead of long forms and I many times use them wrong not knowing exactly if I used the right ones. So, listening to your recordings back then when you’ve posted them, I’d say you’re doing quite good.
Gee, Michael! I’m trying to convince you, you’ll win at the end!
It’s not must do 10 challenges in the row if it doesn’t feel to you like doing them. You tried and you think it didn’t go quite well or quite to yuor expectations so maybe you should try your plan instead. Just don’t get stuck into too many repetitions. This wouldn’t be too rewarding I think.
Yes and that’s the point. When I’ve bought the first Welsh course (book + CD) it was written at the very beginning of it that thsi is material which you would study approximately 3 years! “Three years!” I almost shouted (fortunately the room was empty, just me inside) and started to search for something more suitable and with immediate effect. SSiW offers just that, efficient learning with (more or less) immediate effect if even the smallest one! I’ve started and grabbed (oooo, ja … with a lot of moaning) it with both hands. I hope and believe at the end @aran will manage to cast a spell of his magic onto your path of learning aswell just as he did on mine, just some other way maybe …
And as @M2017 says, Anki system is quite efficient but it depends how you use it and how you create your own cards. If you didn’t know, there is also a community sharing their own courses of all kinds and you can “grab” them and alter to your needs if you want, using them online or storing them on the computer. Well, @M2017, to be honest, I am using the system already for quite amount of time but I didn’t try implementing video or audio material yet. Probably a bit of lack of time as it might be a bit complicated but I might try one of these days.
Michael I’d offer my deck of Anki to you but unfortunately I didn’t do it for new Levels yet, just for old courses but even there not for all 3 and for all lessons.
So these are my thoughts (again). Sorry for long post. Obviously it’s seen I’m at home and have a bit more time than at work. - hehe
Hwyl!
Tatjana
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I have rarely used audio, and never video, because it takes more time to set up - but I can really imagine it would provide a huge benefit if I could be bothered. I do use pictures occasionally for prompting individual bits of vocab, but overall I firmly believe learning with context is one of the most rewarding things you can do.
Regarding decks created by other people, and sharing of decks - they can be good for getting going quickly, but at the end of the day you learn as much if not more by creating the cards in the first place, and then they have exactly the focus you want for them. More importantly, they hardly ever have any context - just individual words!
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Agreed. + you learn when you do them already what gives you extra value.
Regarding Anki cards, I have quite a lot of experience as a programmer. It would be about an hour’s work to write a script that scrapes the vocabularies from the website and transforms them into a format that Anki could read. However, I would only do that with @aran 's permission and I would totally understand if he would not be comfortable with it.
Cheers, Michael
Might be easier if @aran just provided a file with all the vocab - I am sure he’s got one. I do have a python script already that grabs the vocab and puts it into a csv file, but it only works for the challenges that don’t require logging in. I didn’t put in more effort than that because copy pasting for each lesson really just takes a minute.
@Eigentime
It’s been a bank holiday here in the UK this weekend and I am sure that Aran will be able to help you more with your concerns as soon as he gets back from his family wedding.
I am not an expert on learning methods but an observation would be that it is often difficult for those who have been used to, and have Bern successful in, one method of learning to switch to another. Possibly because it seems so counter intuitive and out of their usual comfort zone. What do you think?
As someone who was unsuccessful in learning by the grammar method over many years of trying SSiW is the only way in which I have been able to consider myself a Welsh speaker.
I do hope you are able to continue with SSiW as I am sure your experience will be valuable to further development of SSiW. Good luck!
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Bern = been.
I have heard this so many times that people who have failed to reach any kind of fluency with traditional methods, but then find it a revelation to fly through SSIW and suddenly find that they can speak Welsh after all!
For exercising your Welsh conversation muscle, this method is indisputably brilliant.
The jury might still be out as to whether pushing all beginners through the challenges with no repetition is necessarily the best strategy. I suspect I might have found that tough. Like many other ‘beginners’ (very many, I suspect) I’d briefly tried learning a few years earlier. So I already had some idea what it was all about, and I went on to use the old courses very successfully and happily - although not in the currently recommended way at all.
It would be terrible to put any people off.
I know there’s a lot of people around using SSIW lessons as part of a range of strategies. Maybe more discussion of that would be useful.
I can’t quite remember why I started sounding off about the detail of writing language courses earlier in the thread - sorry about that. The point I wanted to make was that doing the lessons needn’t and shouldn’t be unpleasant and frustrating. In fact it absolutely mustn’t be or people won’t do it!
I hope you can find a happy strategy @Eigentime that makes your personal best use of these resources!
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Hi Michael,
I’ve been following this thread and your progress as an interested, also brand new SSiW learner. I have nothing to reference in terms of learning language in different ways, except high school French over 30 years ago.
I find this challenging for sure but I quickly took recommendations from the forum and I gave up having ANY expectations. I set a goal of about half a lesson at one time, 5 days a week minimum, and I have no specific goal as to when I will be speaking/reading/writing fluently - only that I will. I may have misunderstood the recommendation about doing 10 lessons straight through. Was that in one sitting? I couldn’t fathom doing 2 lessons straight through without stopping, let alone 10. I do 10-15 minutes, sometimes 20 in one sitting and if that’s all my brain can handle in a day I am fine with that. I feel a little bit of frustration when I pick up the lesson later in the day or the next day and can’t get the sentences out before Catrin but letting myself off the hook and continuing on has made the whole process so much more enjoyable and I can see that I’m learning, however slowly. The less stress I feel around it, the better I do. I work a lot of hours, have kids, live in America… who needs the extra stress?! Noone is forcing me to learn Welsh - this is a personal choice, and I expect I’ll be learning/fine tuning for the rest of my life.
All of that blah blah blah is to say…you sound like a seriously smart, accomplished, and diligent man and will assuredly reach your goal. From the outside it really looks as though you are expecting far too much of yourself, and the stress isn’t helping. For all I know, you have a reason why you must learn the language as fast as possible but, if that’s not the case, do you think slowing it down and forcing yourself to let go of the high expectations would produce fewer stress hormones thus allowing for more positive feelings during a lesson and smoother integration? Oh, here’s a good example, I was doing my usual morning lesson last Friday (again, a portion of the whole lesson) and got an urgent call from a client in the middle of the lesson. The stress hormones kicked in and once I got off the phone I absolutely couldn’t concentrate when I picked the lesson back up. I had to cool off for some time before I could go back.
Anyhow, I’m cheering for you from the sidelines. Here’s my disclaimer: I am no expert on anything I said above. I’m just nosy, I’ve been through years of therapy to manage anxiety (hence, all the talk about stress hormones), and I wish for you to enjoy learning Welsh. 
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My goodness! I don’t think anyone could manage that and still be getting anything out of it by the end!
When people talk about that, they are referring to doing 10 challenges in order, without repeating any.
Phew, I’m exhausted just thinking about doing 10 in one sitting!
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Helo pawb.
Now for the clearance this 10 in a row a bit (and some more gooddys).
10 Challenges without repetition usually is thought as doing a challenge a day (or more if it feels like that) without going back and usually without using pause button. This doesn’t mean you must do 10 challenges in one go (in one day or so)
I’m not sure did I miss something somewhere, but there was never recommendation of doing 10 challenges in a row as the best method but as much as I can recall @aran’s strategy, he usually uses this method as a test of one’s ability and feel like when finishing them all (10 in a row without repetition (not at once)) and going back to older (probably most hard at the beginning) Challenge. So as I recall there was never mentioned anywhere this method is the most suitable or the best to go with. But as I said, it might be I’ve missed something somewhere.
Then on … I wouldn’t claim no one can do 10 challenges in a day. Ask @Novem how many she did in a weekend and ask those who survived 5 intensive course how many did they do in a row. If there are 25 Challenges and they had 5 days, they had to do 5 challenges a day to complete everything + activities which Aran put in front of them in the afternoon/evening every single day, what could be equivalent to doing 10 lessons a day as they had to struggle all 5 days entirely in Welsh with no-English rule. Not that all would survive something like that, but there are people who do. All about both 5-days intensives you can read here and in another topic of the same kind, starting here, reading about the first ever testers of the method. But, as I’ve said, not everyone would survive this. I surely wouldn’t.
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Some people do,
I have done six in one day, and I found it really rewarding. I think it might depend on what kind of person you are. I have a friend who does SSiW everyday at a regular time. But I just wouldn’t do that. I know that if I decided to do it everyday that I would miss a day and then feel that I’d ‘failed’. By doing 6 lessons in one day (after all that’s only 3 hours) I felt really excited that I’d managed to do it. So, I prefer to ‘binge’ on SSiW 
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