Last time I tried radio Cymru I understood nothing. But today I find that there are quite a few words I know, and others I know/can work out if I think about it.
So I was wondering, is it better to just listen and wait until I can understand in cymraeg or translate it into english and understand the meaning from that?
(Obviously I am aiming for eventually understanding the cymraeg without english appearing at any point)
Ta!
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The most useful thing is just that you spend time giving your brain exposure to the Welsh - it doesn’t matter much whether you consciously try to translate it or not, because the end result will always be the same - you just need to have the patience to keep giving your brain that exposure… 
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Because it works 
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It’s very good if you can combine the two approaches: just uncontrolled exposure (listening to the radio for an indefinite amount of time without trying to translate anything) and the proper listening exercises. For this you can find a short audio, ideally with a script (Growth club content works perfectly for this, or, alternatively, the dialogues from the Mynediad/Teach yourself and other Welsh courses). The first time you listen just to get the gist of the audio - who’s talking, what, roughly, they’re talking about, what their attitude seems to be. Then, the second time, you listen for some specific detail. If it’s an exercise from a coursebook, it will have some questions to go with it. If not, you can choose yourself a specific task. Again, the aim is not to understand every single word, but to concentrate on getting a specific bit of information.
Then, after you’ve listened to it twice, you can listen again while reading the script at the same time, this way you can notice some contractions and pronunciation features that appear in the spoken language and make it hard for you to recognize the original words, and you can try to pronounce then as the natives do.
Well, at least that’s what I do with my Russian/English/Italian students, I don’t see why that wouldn’t work for Welsh:)
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Or the listening exercises in Level 1…
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Will there be listening exercises in Level 2?
Yes… Should be published fairly early in the new year…
Unless you have someone around who can explain in simple Cymraeg what words mean, I think you really do have to look them up and find out what the English is. Staying in Welsh while on Bootcamp is fine because there are people around to ask. Similarly at a Meetup or maybe in a Skype conversation. If you don’t have that luxury then you just do what is practical.
Although I do sometimes listen purely as background sound, more often I try to listen intently, and I’m sitting at my computer. I concentrate on speech-only programmes (although I also listen to Sesiwn Fach as there is often quite a bit of interviewing going on, as well as the great music) and try to understand what I can just from the Cymraeg, but if I don’t understand a word, and if it seems to come up more than once in a programme, I write it down in a notebook. Sometimes I also look it up (in an online dictionary usually), and write down the meaning(s) there and then. At other times I look them up later. But I do look them up, except on the occasions when I can work them out from the context (which isn’t all that often, although it happens).
I think we all have to do what feel right for us, and that mostly feels right for me. Some of it is an act of faith in that I like to think that some understanding will just come by repeated listening and “osmosis”. I think certainly word recognition (if not necessarily actual understanding) really does improve just with constant exposure and repetition, and it sounds like that’s happening for you as well.
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In addition to listening to the Level 1 listening exercises at least twice a day, I’ve also taken to “listening” to Radio Cymru as often as I can. I’m now up to understanding about 4% of what is being said at any given moment (or as I’d like to think: my listening comprehension has increased 400% from when I first began listening!) Even though I might not comprehend the other 96% of what is being said yet, I have started to notice that dialogue is feeling a bit more “natural” especially after completing more and more SSiW challenges! At this point I’m banking on @aran’s theory actually being a law and that my subconscious will eventually be able to make sense of what I’m hearing. 
, However, in the meantime I think I might give your practice of listening a bit more intentionally and writing down new words a go, @mikeellwood.
Yesterday, I consciously noticed during one particular interview that the interviewee seemed to be struggling to find his words. He seemed to be saying “a, a, a, a” quite a bit. But I couldn’t quite determine if he was saying the English equivalent of “and, and, and ,and” or something more along the lines of “um, um, um, um.” Which brings me to a question that seems germane to this thread… how do Welsh speakers tend to verbalize awkward pauses?
Diolch for starting this thread, @jenny_white_378. 
Well, I don’t listen to Radio Cymru much but when I do, I listen to it as I’d listen to another radio. I usually don’t translate anything at all but I’m very easily “disturbed” with English words when I hear them in the middle of Cymraeg speach. To be honest, this helps quite to understand the gist of the discussion or whatever but still … I back @aran’s theory here because I find myself very often, thinking later about what I’ve listened to on Radio Cymru, that I just understand quite a lot and at least I know what they’ve spoken about so, I believe just listening - if even conscious - without too much effort of translation is just good enough. For us who aren’t native English speakers translation means additional work though as we (unconsciously) translate Cymraeg into English and then process everything what we’ve translated into native language (at least this goes for me for some (unknown) reason) 
To follow up what Mike said,
one thing I’ve found useful in listening to Radio Cymru is just to try and immediately repeat everything out loud, i.e. like an echo, whether I understand it or not. I can only manage one or two words or occasionally short phrases before stumbling and losing track but for me it does help word recognition, and certainly helps concentration. Any accuracy of pronunciation at the time does really suffer in the struggle, but it certainly helps to boost speed of pronunciation and I feel I can focus on improving accuracy at other times.
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You and me both, chief…
By the time you’ve got to the end of Level 2, if you’ve carried on doing passive listening with Radio Cymru, I would imagine that you’ll be starting to pick up some larger chunks, which will start to give you a stronger sense of what the conversation is about - which is a fairly exciting step in the process…
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Looking forward to that moment!
Similar to radio, but I started moving onto watching things on S4C, and have tried with some Welsh Subtitles.
What are people opinions on watching Welsh programming with Welsh subtitles? Do you think it helps learners, or would you say it is worse in the long run?
The best exposure of all is without subtitles (but it hurts more!) - having said that, comprehensible input is a huge help, so listening either with and then without (or the other way round, I guess) is definitely valuable. But don’t fall into the trap of always listening with subtitles - because that will be a much slower process for you…
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Subtitles are very helpful, I think, but it’s better to “work” with them, because otherwise one might start just lazily watching everything with them, and the listening skills will be developing very slowly. I normally use a combination of techniques: watching without the subtitles then with them; watching half of the program with them and the rest - without; watching the program with subtitles in the morning and later in the day or the next day without the subtitles and see how much you can understand. When working with video, it’s also very fun to watch something (for example, 5 minutes of a TV-series you know well) without the sound first, trying to guess what the characters might be saying (in Welsh, of course), maybe pronouncing it for them too, and then watch it again with the sound on - generally, the plot is so cliched that the dialogues we make up are very similar to the ones that are actually in the series.
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Subtitles-perhaps its a question of what seems right for you at the time. When your vocab is relatively small, you dont really know what to listen out for so subtitles definitely help then. As your vocab grows you can do without them more and more.
As far as radio goes,I think there is place for more than one type of listening,depending on your circumstances and where you are on your learning journey.
Part of it is having the confidence to listen and not worry if you dont seem to understand a single thing. Gradually over time more and more will make sense and it should eventually become a self-reinforcing virtuous circle.
But it takes time and patience.
Dal ati! 
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I’m sure it’s a personal thing, but I found watching with Welsh subtitles really frustrating. I couldn’t read the Welsh fast enough to be able to also listen to what they were saying, and when the subtitles didn’t match exactly either it would really throw me. I switched to using English subtitles so that I could glance at the text, get a quick understanding of what they were about to say, then listen to the Welsh and I had a lot of “ah, that’s how you say xxxx in Welsh!” so I found I learnt quite a lot. But I just used the subtitles as trainer wheels and watched more and more without them, putting them on occasionally if I’d had 2 or 3 attempts at understanding something that seemed vital to the plot but just couldn’t get it. Then I would switch them back off and carry on without them.
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Cheers for the replies 
Think will try the watching with subtitles and then without method. At the moment I know a very low percentage of actual vocab (though a lot of the structures.)
Nearly finished course 3, and have just been wondering what will be my next focus in terms of language learning method haha
I think my vocabulary is small enough that all it really does is add a bit more to my understanding, still don’t understand the majority
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If you haven’t already tried reading, now may be the time to start. It can be a great way to increase vocabulary.