I’ve playing around with the idea of a beginners-only or at least a beginners-specific hangout on welshspeakingpractice.slack.com for the last month or two.
One of the problems we found was that a few of the people who would naturally attend this (the 6MWS people) were generally scheduled to take part in their weekly 6MWS hangouts at the same time. This lead to some hangouts being a bit quiet.
So, I think the consensus was - to make these beginners hangouts a bit more random - not scheduling them every single week, running them at times out of kilt with the others.
With this in mind, there will be a hangout this Thursday (24th) at 8pm on the #beginners channel of welshspeakingpractice.slack.com
It would be great to see a fair army of SSIW people over there. We will keep things simple, introductions, some basic questions to each other - in order to take the important first steps in speaking your first bits of Welsh out there in the wild.
For those who haven’t joined yet, you can email admin@saysomethingin.com with the email title “WSP” to get hold of an invite to the group.
Hi Nicky. I live to far to meet up unfortunately. I was wondering if there is a 'place, 'forum. for the absolute beginner. Most of the forums are, to me, way above my learning grade and deal with the grammatical problems or reasons.
All I want to do is hear the word and follow and learn from the spoken examples. That’s enough for me. My way of learning is to type it up and use phonetics to assist re pronunciation. Trouble is a lot of the words given are not in a dictionary. Chance for example. I cannot find any word in a welsh dictionary, printed or online that resembles the word as given in Lesson1(4). Its probably me but I thought Id ask. Hope you don’t mind. I’m waiting for the phrase…I just love it…!
Have you found the vocabulary lists that go with each lesson? Lesson 4’s vocab list includes “cyfle – chance”. It mutates to “gyfle” in some of the examples. I find the lists very useful when I can’t quite make out what sound I am hearing. In particular, I often think that I am hearing “v” when it is really “dd”.
As for the forum, I just ignore anything that is too complicated for me at the moment. Sorry, I can’t comment on Slack because I have not yet got round to joining, but I’m sure that someone else will be along soon.
Sue
Re somewhere for the complete beginner, have you thought of learning via the 6 Month Welsh Speaker course? - which is for absolute beginners and allows you to ask questions of the tutors weekly and also start speaking practice on online hangouts virtually from week 1. Search box top right for ‘6 month welsh speaker’.
Alternatively (or in addition), you can join the Welsh Speaking Practice website on Slack and begin to have your first conversations in Welsh with other beginners. You can receive an invitation to join it by emailing: admin@saysomethingin.com . You will find there for instance Nicky’s beginners’ hangouts, as above, the next one of which is 5th September from 5:30-6:30pm. There are many of us at the early stages of learning Welsh (plus some very sympathetic advanced speakers) who are waiting there to practise some Welsh with you…
As Sue has said, most of us at the early stages ignore the in-depth grammatical discussions.
S’mae Nicky,
Is the schedule for these beginner sessions published anywhere? I think it’s about time for me to join but I’m a bit intimidated by the main group calls as I really struggle to understand much at all so I think I’d end up saying nothing.
Diolch, Gareth Mitchell