Today is the first anniversary of my starting learning Welsh with SSiW – I’ve baked a cake (highest density chocolate cake ever, it even has its own gravitational field), I’ve brewed some beer (the attractively named “Frank as Apollo”), and I’ve taken stock of what I’ve got out of the last year of learning.
At the start of the year I’d pootled around with conventional lessons for a year and had got nowhere. Now I’m a few lessons into SSiW course 3. By a rough reckoning I’ve spent 300 hours listening to Iestyn and Cat teach me Welsh. They’ve hung out with me practically every evening, they’ve been on holiday with me, they’ve been on work trips (last week we did a few lessons together on a veranda overlooking a lake in Finland), and they’re currently spending lunchtimes with me in the grounds of St Fagans castle.
They’ve been strict teachers and some of what they’ve told me has been pretty unpalatable – the instruction to avoiding reading was very hard. I read and I write therefore I am. Even so, I followed their advice for as long as I could until halfway through the second course I cracked. Emails started coming through to me in Welsh and I kept finding myself on Welsh websites. It would have been rude not to find out what they were saying. Now I’m reading Welsh books for pleasure every day. It’s like doing a crossword at the same time as watching a detective story, but every time I go back through a book I find I understand a bit more. I’m excited even thinking about how much fun this is! So was there any point to depriving myself of reading for as long as I did? Yes, I was told last week that my pronounciation was almost perfect – damn those “r’s”! - and that’s because Iestyn and Cat stopped me mangling my mind by anglicising Welsh spellings. Thanks both.
Then there are the radio and tv programmes that are slowly opening up to me. At the start of the year I could snatch a word from a sentence and be pleased, now I can snatch a phrase from a good number of sentences. Even better I can follow the gist of conversations that are happening around me. That’s pretty incredible as well and, again, it’s down to Iestyn and Cat.
And then there’s just the sheer wonderment that I’m doing this at all! I mean, heavens, I’ve got a window on a whole new culture, thanks to the work that Iestyn and Cat have done with me over the last year. Simple things like words that are a joy to say: “gwthio”, “wyneb” and “darllen”, to a growing insight into how differently the world looks when you use a different language.
So has it all been great? Well no. Some of it has been absolutely awful. Like any voyage of discovery there have been doldrums, tempests and times spent lost in uncharted waters. There have been weeks spent in the depths of despair as Iestyn and Cat have tried to navigate me through “bod” and possession – but now I can look back on those wide seas and know I’ve conquered the worst they had to offer, even if the detail still evades Perhaps most testing of all has been the growing awareness of how vast this whole business of learning a language is. It’s not a sprint, it’s not a marathon, it’s more like an odyssey. The answer for me? Persistence – do a little, do a lot, do it badly, do it well, just do something, every day. There have been failures too. Speech is my weakest card and a constant source of frustration, and no amount of encouragement from Iestyn and Cat has solved that one. But that’s just confidence, time… and Bootcamp
So here’s to a year of learning with SSiW. The most phenomenal learning resource I’ve ever come across. And to Aran and Catrin and the forum members who have provided all the support I needed. Learning is nice, but it’s better when it’s done in company.
So why go to the trouble of writing a post like this? Because you guys deserve something more than the few pounds I’m giving you every month. Thanks SSiW. I’m off to get the cake out of the oven now.
