Those Mawddach mangoes are legendary, aren’t they?
1 Like
ASIUI, they are believed to constitute the main subject matter of the lost Fifth Branch of the Mabinogion[1]
[1] Mango fab Manawydan in which Mango, son of Manawydan, son of Llyr, is turned into an exotic fruit after refusing to believe Llyd the enchanter that plantains are the souls of naughty children and not just some funny banana.
3 Likes
Hmm, etiquette of reviving old threads versus starting a new thread about something people have often discussed before…
I’ve made my choice.
I have finished level 2 of SSiW, sticking to “listen and speak only” without much cheating, and that’s enough avoiding books for me! I have now given in to my bookworm nature and want to read. I also love to understand the whys and wherefores of words and phrases. So, obviously I want to get some grammar books, but… which ones? Everyone says “Gareth King’s books!” Since I cannot buy them all at once, and @garethrking you are very conveniently here on this forum… which of your books are best to use first, as an absolute beginner with reading and grammar, and is there a straight linear progression or would some of them (which?) be used better alongside each other?
I am a completist and very interested in learning all I can, so I will probably buy all of them eventually, but I need to plan my budget and get them in the most useful order. (If anyone has knowledge of current or upcoming sales, that would help!)
I have also thought about requesting books from my local library, but I suspect it may not be feasible. Pretty obviously since I’m in Sussex, they have very little Welsh material in stock (though Mr King’s Modern Welsh Dictionary is in the reference section in the next town, about 3 miles away! 
) and I rather doubt there’s much popular demand.
2 Likes
Hi Verity - naturally I am always very pleased to meet completists! 
I would say (assorted pals on here may have different views - they will say so!) that absolute reading/grammar beginners should go for either Colloquial Welsh which is a conventional course-book taking beginners gradually through most of the grammar, with exercises and dialogues interspersed throughout, or Basic Welsh which takes forty grammatical points in ascending order of basic importance and gives exercises on each one. You can see the forty points if you look at the Read sample facility on Amazon. And its cover is a lovely shade of blue.
Either of these, though different, is a good choice for beginners, I suggest.
There is also an argument for the big comprehensive grammar Modern Welsh, but this is more of a reference book (no jokes, for a start!), with pretty well complete coverage of the whole structure of the language, and (latest edition) useful appendices and a whole section on communicative/situational patterns (there ARE some jokes in this section, mind). Again the Read sample is available for you to see contents. Comes in a lovely shade of khaki.
Where in Sussex are you?
3 Likes
Thank you very much for your answer, that helps. I will check out the Amazon previews and probably get Colloquial Welsh first. When / where do Working Welsh and Thinking Welsh fit? Intermediate level?
I am in Lancing, West Sussex. I was surprised to find out recently that there is one other Welsh learner in the village, when I went to my first CACEN meet-up.
The dictionary resides at Worthing Library. West Sussex libraries catalogue has a tiny handful of books in Welsh right now, mostly children’s. (I’ll possibly read them anyway, as I’m grown-up enough not to care what people think.)
1 Like
Working Welsh and Thinking Welsh are indeed primarily aimed at intermediates - they assume a knowledge of the fundamentals, although the latter title in particular includes articles on broad themes, like for example tenses and plural formations and suchlike…so I think and hope even relative beginners could find them useful. It also quotes a line from the original Welsh screenplay of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, and mentions both Queen Cleopatra VII and photon torpedoes in the index, as others here will confirm. So quite a rollercoaster ride really. Again there is a Read sample facility on Amazon for both these books, I think.
When Colloquial Welsh was published, the first time I saw an actual copy was when I went into Waterstones Eastbourne (!) the next day (for something else!) and happened to see someone perusing it from the shelf. He bought it. I signed it.
One should indeed never care what people think. See my remarks above on the TW index.
4 Likes
Personally I’d say if you’ve got that far in SSiW, and based on the questions you ask being similar to the things I wonder about myself, that Thinking Welsh would be right up your street. It’s excellent for dipping in and out of and as a general reference. I’ve not needed to ask as many questions in the forum since getting it, which is sad in a way.
My only criticism (sorry @garethrking, I’ve held this in for months by now) is the way the book has been typeset. The headers of the page are useless as they don’t change apart from the page number, and the page numbers aren’t used in the contents or index. It makes finding things quite frustrating as you can’t see the entry numbers as you flick through, and I regularly forget I am even looking for an entry number instead of a page number. I hope this gets fixed if there is ever a 2nd edition.
1 Like
I do rather sympathise with your criticism there - the page numbers are indeed of no relevance to either the text itself or the index. Therefore I will mention this to the publishers for a second edition. 
3 Likes
How to say photon torpedoes in Welsh? You’re answering the real questions there!
Seriously though, I want to know. Thinking Welsh has moved up the priority list. I’m at the stage of trying to have longer conversations, and boring people about my favourite TV shows is exactly the kind of thing I can’t do yet. Dw i’n hoffi sci-fi is the best I’ve managed. (Google translate says sci-fi yn Gymraeg is sci-fi, but do I trust Google? Not much.)
Playing devil’s advocate with a bit tongue-in-cheek, what’s the English for “photon torpedo”? 
Photon is a direct import from Greek, and torpedo is imported from Latin. The Welsh for “torpedo” is torpedo, sometimes torpido, reflecting the English pronunciation, and “photon” is ffoton in Welsh, so in the usual Welsh word order you get torpedo ffoton.
For “Science fiction”, my dictionaries at hand offer either ffuglen gwyddonol or gwyddonias.
1 Like
Geiriadur yr Academi gives the portmanteau ffugwyddonol as the adjective, and although they don’t give a noun, I would construe that ffugwyddoniaeth might cut it. Not as succinct as Sci-Fi though! 
2 Likes
“Ffu-Gwy”?
3 Likes
Love it!
1 Like
Hmmm. Just tried a search for ffugwyddoniaeth and the Wicipedia page that was the top result is clearly using it as an equivalent of English “pseudo-science”…
1 Like
Guess we’d better stick to sai-ffai to avoid confusion 
3 Likes
Indeed, English steals a great deal of its vocabulary. Or borrows, if one takes “loanword” literally… but… when does the loan expire, and what shall we do then?!
Torpido ffoton is easy enough to remember, but there’s plenty more vocab I need if I’m to be a proper nerd yn Gymraeg.
I might want to talk about mundane life now and then too. Whatever I end up wanting to say, what better way to gain vocab than reading? I love being able to justify my book habit with “It’s educational!”
The potential confusion between science fiction and fictional/pseudo science mentioned above is just the kind of thing that makes me wary of literal translations without input from fluent speakers.
I think of a Romanian immigrant who, speaking of breathing, said we “inspire” and then “expire”. It wasn’t an appropriate moment to interrupt, and then later it seemed such a silly, nitpicky thing to mention to him. After all, he was as they say Not Wrong.
2 Likes
Very wise. And I think I do discuss this in the article on Dictionaries in Thinking Welsh.
Unless that was a dream.
1 Like
I went on gwales.com, picked a random sci-fi book, and then toggled the language of the website from English to Cymraeg.
Within the book’s description it said “Nofel sci-fi,” (score one for Google!) however, there was also this at the end:
Mae’r teitl yma yn y categori a/neu is-gategori canlynol:
3 Likes
This is an excellent tactic - I do it myself all the time when trying to work out the Welsh for a phrase that hasn’t yet hit the dictionaries or the various specialist terminology lists. And I think your choice of gwales.com as a website to try it on for sci-fi was inspired.
But I’m not sure that you can thank Google for it - it should be the case that the copy on the website has been provided in both languages by the organisation (rather than relying on Google to do the deed). So when I try this trick I always make sure that I pick a site that I know will have been carefully prepared/translated by actual Welsh speakers (as you did here), rather than taking up Google’s offer of translation.
(The inconsistency you noticed is probably that “ffuglen wyddonol” is the official term, which Gwales has chosen to use, and “sci-fi” is the term that people probably use more often, which the publisher has chosen to use when writing their blurb, and which Gwales has just copied and pasted.)
2 Likes
Yes, when I said “score one for Google” I meant, Google got this one at least partially right - people do use “sci-fi” when speaking/writing Welsh.
I did indeed choose gwales.com because I knew they’d have written the Welsh themselves; I used the button at the top right that said “Cymraeg”. And then of course I got a pop-up from Google offering to translate the page into English for me! LOL.
Having Google translate a page is much the same risk as typing things into their Translate page/app, except that you might hope that with a larger chunk / more context it will do better… maybe.