I started SSIW just over two years ago, for the sole reason that I couldn’t get out to evening classes with two small children (starting at Welsh school).
I soon realised I’d stumbled across the most inspired and liberating approach to language learning imaginable! I completed all the audio based course lessons while driving to work or doing housework, and found myself with a solid basis in the language which would have taken years of time and effort to achieve through traditional classes.
Encouraged by the inimitably positive and supportive online forum, I went on to seek out only activities I felt were actively enjoyable to develop further - mostly reading Welsh books, listening to Radio Cymru and organising Skype calls with other learners.
The time and effort involved has been fairly minimal - an absolute godsend when trying to coordinate busy family life - and considering the amount of ‘work’ involved, my Welsh is now immeasurably better than it should be! (To the extent that I can now chat happily to most of the teachers at school, which was one of my main aims.)
Well, when I started learning to speak Welsh some few years ago now, I started on the old course 1 like many others here. There’s one thing that this course did that no other course before it ever has - it keeps you speaking. There are sounds in Welsh which aren’t in English; the trilled r (both voiced and voiceless), as well as the more obvious ll and ch sounds. The old course introduced them with an explanation of what to actually do with your mouth (a thing that many courses seem to miss out when introducing new sounds), then made you keep using them until they became natural.
Because you are constantly speaking, your accent gradually becomes more like that of the demonstrators (to the point where people may well mistake you for a native). Because you don’t read or write until much later, you don’t learn to mispronounce things before you learn to actually pronounce them properly. Because you’re having to come up with new sentences and phrases using what you’ve already learned, you’re more prepared to actually do so once you need to actually communicate with people. Because you develop a natural understanding for the basic structures of the language, new vocabulary becomes easier to learn, and easier to actually speak about. It is, in short, an excellent means of learning to speak enough of a language to get by in a relatively short time, as well as laying the groundwork for future successful study should you wish to do so. Until the 4K project is sorted out, it won’t be enough by itself to make one a truly proficient speaker of a language (but then, no course truly is); but it is an excellent starting point and, given a business language focus rather than the more casual conversational focus used in the current courses, would certainly teach a typical learner enough of whatever language it teaches to get by in a typical workplace.
I started learning Welsh by trying to glean bits from BBC courses and other more conventional sources. When I found SSIW by accident and tried the first course, I realised that as a person living outside Wales, this was the only sure means of me learning to be a Welsh speaker. The courses seem to mimic the way in which a child might learn to be a first language speaker. The method is highly effective, using repetitions of patterns and their variations. There are all sorts of clever devices which lead one to anticipate patterns an vocabulary. The informal language is easy to pick up and is always funny with a bit of wicked wit thrown in. The format of the courses means one can learn anywhere at any time. I have practised Welsh on 4 different continents, in planes, cars, whilst out running etc. And because of that portability, regular practise is easy. Not achieving this is where I’ve fallen down before; establishing the regular use of a language seems to be the key to successful learning.
As a result of SSIW, I’ve become an habitual Welsh speaker. SSIW has got me quickly to the point where more and regular conversations should get me to being a natural sounding speaker, something I’ve not been able to achieve with other language learning methods.
Many people have asked me if it’s difficult to learn Welsh; with SSIW it just isn’t, in fact nothing could be more natural
Just before last Christmas I thought it would be fun learning just a little Welsh and surprise my wife Eirwen at Yuletide.
Eirwen and I have been married for over 40 years and Eirwen’s first language is Welsh while mine is English. We have spent nearly all our married life outside of Wales first in Canada, then in California and now ‘‘sort of retired’’ on the border of France and Italy. Our relationship has always been in English.
Anyway, I imagined myself surprising Eirwen in the festive season with “Happy Christmas - I love you” spoken in Welsh and I turned to SSiW to do that. That was the extent of my expectation from the course and I was going to be very satisfied with SSi if I pulled it off reasonably well.
About a month later at Christmas I prepared for a hero’s welcome from Eirwen as I burst into Welsh ““absorbed”” from my practice with the first SSiW lessons. Much to my surprise Eirwen, instead of beaming with pleasure was quite angry with me.
"YOU HAVE BEEN ABLE TO SPEAK WELSH ALL OUR MARRIED LIFE AND HAVE HIDDEN IT FROM ME’’
Justin: “No” I countered “there’s this fabulous course offered by SSi”.
Eirwen: “Impossible”" - she said - “your Welsh is too good - you must have learned Welsh in school”.
Justin: “But they didn’t teach Welsh in my school. I never heard any of my class-mates speak Welsh”
Eirwen: " Well you must have been surrounded by people who spoke Welsh at home"
Justin: sarcastically “I don’t think my Dad picked up much Welsh in Singapore!!”
Justin: “I swear I’ve never spoken a sentence of Welsh before in my life”
Fast forward a year later and Eirwen has met some of the SSi founders and other amazing people through the SSi Forum and is now often busy networking with her friends in Canada and the U.S; about this fantastic organisation SSi that can turn an “English” husband into Llewelyn ap Gruffudd.
I’m also taking SSi Spanish and I’m sure Eirwen is hoping her Llewelyn ap Gruffudd is also capable of an equally difficult transition and become Antonio Banderas. So far so good …!!
One word to the wise - SSi should come with a safety warning attached : CAUTION - SSi MAY CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
With SSIW it is possible to work through the lessons over one weekend and emerge at the other side able to have a normal conversation with a welsh speaker where the language comes to you naturally.
How many other approaches offer that after just one weekend!?
About 8 months ago, I wanted to know how to pronounce Welsh names and places in a book I was reading, so I started Googling and came across SSiW. I live in the United States, and I’d never heard Welsh spoken. I did the first lesson just to see what it was like, never imagining I’d actually learn how to speak the language. Now, I’m almost halfway through the intermediate course, and I’m a Welsh speaker! The course, which consists of listening and speaking, teaches patterns which make it easy to express a broad range of things very quickly. It’s a very natural way to learn. The material is reinforced as the lessons go along, so there’s no trying to memorize lists of vocabulary or verb tenses. There is no writing involved, which helps with developing a natural accent. It’s amazing the way the patterns and vocabulary just “stick”. It is convenient, because I can listen whenever I have time, even while driving or doing housework. I work at my own pace. The lessons are never dry - there’s humor and encouragement in them which make them fun. There are also listening and speaking practices in addition to the lessons, which are very helpful for extra practice and listening comprehension.
One of the best things is that there is an online forum with the friendliest and most helpful international community. When I ask a question, I often get a reply within the hour. There’s lots of information there about a broad variety of topics. And via the forum, I found a partner with whom I can practice via Skype. This is really helpful since I live so far from Wales.
It’s very generous of the founders to offer the entire introductory level of Welsh at no charge. There is a huge amount of material taught in those 25 lessons. The monthly subscription for the intermediate and advanced courses is nominal. I’ve studied other languages with traditional courses. I’ve learned more Welsh in less time by far with SSiW. I can’t imagine a better way to learn a language.
I have been learning with SSiW for 9 months now, and I genuinely cannot believe how well I have got on. It is such a testament to this method that I have progressed so well as I had NO expectation of sticking with it (having previously been hopeless at French & German). I imagined this would go the same way, a week or two of enthusiasm followed by a feeling that it was all too difficult, and within a short time my desire to learn would be extinguished by lack of progress and motivation. Instead I have found that:
without the stress of learning reading and writing there is a wonderful immediacy of acquisition. Speaking and listening is all you need when you begin at the beginning.
because progress is fast the enthusiasm remains high …and the desire to learn more is really quite addictive. I need to hear and speak some Welsh every day now, or I get withdrawal symptoms. I can’t stop now - I’m in too deep!
unbelievably, now I know how so much Welsh sounds I have looked at the words and actually can read and understand a fair bit without feeling at any point that I have ‘learnt’ to read. It’s just happened naturally.
To sum up. Start with SSi and you will be hooked. You will never look back. I’m so happy I found this method and can’t thank all the SSiW team enough for what they have given me, and all the amazing learners on this forum that help and support my learning. When my dream comes true…and i get my home on Ynys Môn you’re all invited round!
My young newly-married nephew just bought a dilapidated water-mill complete with mediaeval tower on Ynys Mon. He and his wife will be renovating it for years to come. They joke that their favourite water feature is the rain that leaks through the roof in their bedroom. He works on forestry projects on the island with teams of people with learning disabilities. His wife designs decorations for weddings and also helps youths with learning disabilities.
I paint this picture because I think their surroundings are as unbelievably beautiful as their lifestyles. I hope your dream comes true and you join them on this heavenly island
Thank you Justin. They have, what sounds to me, a wonderful life in paradise. I would so love to live in a place with that kind of history, being a real history buff who is also lucky enough to work at historic places! I have longed to live there since i was 5 years old. My childhood holidays were magical on that island. I will be selling my house in the Stockport area as soon as my adult children do not all need to live with me…i have a while to wait as they are not earning enough themselves yet to leave the nest. My dream is to downsize in this area to continue working but hopefully get a home in Ynys Môn…which will eventually be my full time forever home. It will be one of the happiest days of my life when I can call that island ‘home’.
Feedback on SSiW.
I have been learning Welsh on and off for many years and must have tried every possible method in my quest to become a Welsh speaker. It was only when I discovered SSiW that I finally had the courage to start speaking with a degree of confidence.
It is a lovely way to learn with grammar and vocabulary coming naturally as one progresses through the levels. I now recommend it to all the learners I meet.
Hope this helps Aran and once again ‘Thank you’ !
Anne
I’m hugely, HUGELY grateful to everyone who’s posted in here - and reading through all the incredibly kind things you’ve said, I’ve realised that this isn’t just going to be MASSIVELY helpful for the new project, it’s also a remarkable source of inspiration for everyone working on this project - any time I feel tired or grumpy, I’m just going to come in here and read this post again.
Thank you all so, SO much - from the very bottom of my heart.
That Huge huge thank you goes oposite way too, @aran!!! Would I know and use that much Cymraeg if there wouldn’t be SSi and hardworking team behind it??? Probably not. And your magic… It’s golden addition!!!
I was one of the early users of SSiW. I had learned some classroom Welsh many years before but could never hold a decent conversation and I forgot a lot of it. Then by chance I discovered SSiW and was hooked on it straight away. I zoomed through the lessons in a matter of weeks and was amazed at the degree of fluency I was able to achieve so quickly and seemingly without effort. (This sounds like one of those old adverts for Smirnoff!) It really forces to brain to work in the right way to produce speech naturally. The touch of humour helps things along too. Furthermore, what one learns seems to stick in the mind remarkably well despite seriously insufficient practice and creeping old age.
More recently I have had cause to take up German. I have tried a variety of conventional courses and can read it to a modest extent, but after spending far more time at it than I ever did on SSiW, I still struggle to have the simplest of conversations by comparison. I long for a SSiGerman course.
I have always wanted to learn how to speak Welsh as a way of connecting with my heritage (my entire family is Welsh). I stumbled upon the SSIW app in Google’s play store one evening and decided to download it. Taking into consideration that the name of the course is “Say Something in Welsh”, I expected (at most) to learn one or two useful words or phrases to impress people at the pub. I soon found out (much to my surprise and joy) that SSIW was a complete language course, and should really be called “Say pretty much ANYTHING in Welsh!”.
I have been learning using this method for less than two months and already consider myself to be at the doorstep of fluency. I could walk into a Welsh speaking establishment and strike up a conversation knowing that I have a safety net (the course has given me many escape routes should the conversation become too complex).
While I may not be able to hold an incredibly deep and meaningful conversation yet, I could get through most day to day social interaction exclusively in Welsh if I had the chance, and I still have plenty of material to cover.
Does the system work?
Let me put it this way. I was born and raised in South Africa and took Afrikaans as a school subject for twelve years. Since using SSIW, I can now speak and understand far more Welsh than Afrikaans (in less than two months!).
What makes it great?
Zero risk. The first course is free, you’ll get a firm understanding of the basics without paying a cent (around 26 hours!), you’ll be able to understand and say an astonishing amount before moving on.
Actually, you’ll be able to say quite a lot of really useful stuff in the first 20 minutes.
Once your firmly addicted, the rest of the content is really affordable (I am on the wrong side of the exchange rate by a large margin, and my monthly fee is less than the cost of three beers).
The courses are MP3 based, meaning you can learn anywhere anytime using the app or your iPod. You can do a lesson or two in traffic, in bed or doing your chores. You could even complete an intensive day while travelling.
No memorising of endless lists. You will learn to speak naturally. The course is structured in such a way that the patterns become second nature (you’ll even start to correctly guess new structures before that are introduced).
The content is constantly revised, if you struggle to remember a word or pattern, keep moving on, it will eventually sink in (seriously, it’s weird).
These guys are funny. The course is littered with humour and you’ll find yourself chucking at the traffic lights.
Support. SSIW is supported by a massive community of really knowledgeable and friendly people from all over the world. You’ll get plenty of support, encouragement and help. The founders somehow manage to make time to answer almost every question or query and everyone is really keen to cheer you on. This is a great place to vent your frustrations or shout your successes from the roof tops. You’ll get the support from day one, the forum is not exclusive to subscribers.
SSIW has changed my life, not only has it afforded me the opportunity to connect with my “Welshness” on an extremely personal level. It has opened up a whole new world of Welsh music and media that I didn’t know existed. I have made friends with people across the globe and most importantly, SSIW has given me the opportunity to play a part in keeping this ancient and important language alive.
I more than recommend this method of language learning, it is revolutionary!
I can’t really better some of the responses above, but I’m going to chip in anyway, as the sheer weight of admiration for the system is also important, I think.
I learned French at school, Italian at university, and German and sign language at evening classes. So I thought I was a bit of an expert in the whole language-learning thing and was a little sceptical about the SSiW approach. But as I was living in England and couldn’t get to ‘proper’ classes it was a convenient way for me to start learning. Then a few lessons into the course I realised that this was something completely different. It was like you’d taken the useful bit of the conventional classes (actually putting sentences together out of your own brain) and jettisoned all the rest of the time-wasting stuff. I was delighted!
With Italian and German, I can read and understand the language fairly well but can’t speak it, which is the result, I think, of too much book learning. With SSiW you start speaking right from the start and you don’t have time to sit and ponder the perfect sentence. So when you then start to use it ‘in the wild’ you don’t get into the terrible learner’s habit of umm-ing and ah-ing while construct the perfect grammatically correct sentence in your head - you just get in there and start speaking.
Most importantly, for me, the approach gives you the same sort of ‘ear’ for the language that the native speaker has. All those quite complicated grammatical things that people spend hours slaving and worrying over in lessons (like mutations) are taught in a natural, gentle way. Now I can often guess at the gender of a word by what ‘sounds’ right, and I haven’t had to sit down and learn mnemonics to help me remember which letters mutate and when - it all feels natural, and if I don’t get them right when I’m speaking, paid â phoeni! When I did start to learnt the ‘proper’ grammar (after completing the SSiW course) , I found I was mainly reading up on explanations of things I was doing naturally anyway.
Starting off a sceptic, I am now utterly converted - this is definitely the best way to learn a language.
SSSiW has to be the most effective course I have encountered since starting to learn Welsh . The evening course we attended were clearly about achieving targets, not understanding. SSSiW is about tapping into my brain in a way that makes sense and aids retention. Backed up by the daily and weekly sessions I can practice to my hearts content.
Another plus are the people who manage to be business like and friendly at the same time. They really deserve success on a bigger stage so I wish the new developments well
SSi Welsh seems to me to be the best means of learning a language, short of actually moving to a country where the language is spoken and immersing oneself in it. I was brought up in English, but moved to Belgium when I was almost twenty-three years of age. There I was immersed in Dutch and learnt it in a natural way: no grammar lessons, no conjugatiions, nothing of the standard academic methods. Because of my work, I later used a great deal of French. I had only a basic academic knowledge of that language, which was, basically, useless. Again, however, the non-grammar immersion proved to be an effective and perfectly natural way to learn the language. Nine years ago, I moved to Spain and have again learnt the language in an immersive manner, only referring to grammatical rules in the way that a native speaker, interested in his own language, would.
SSi Welsh offers much the same experience, certainly as close an experience to actual immersion as is possible with distance learning.
I learned Welsh some years ago & am fluent, but Istill found the advanced lessons of Say Something in Welsh useful to help me sound more natural.
When working as a Welsh for Adults Tutor I always recommended the course. I found that learners who had followed SSi lessons were more confident, had better pronunciation & were more likely to speak Welsh outside of the classroom.
I am following the Spanish course. It is very intense & requires concentration , but it makes the language “stick”. Even if I take a break for a few weeks or even months, when I go back to it I’m amazed at how much comes back to me and how quickly I get back into learning.
You get the framework of your new language very quickly & then pick up the vocabulary you need by actually speaking and using it.
This is exactly what I too want to say in favour of SSiW (or the SSi approach in general).
It gets you speaking from day 1, and it’s the nearest thing out there to learning a language like you learned your first language.
I sometimes think of it as “Michel Thomas on stilts”. I mean it’s a bit like Michel Thomas, but much better (partly because the teachers are native speakers). And it’s still growing and evolving and its creators are humble enough to accept feedback from the learners and adapt.
And what Sara says about “too much book learning”: how true that is (for a lot of us, I suspect, certainly me), and SSi is just the opposite of that.
