How often to native speakers break grammar rules?

[dylan-mont]

I am wondering how often Native Welsh speakers get noun gender wrong,use the wrong mutation,ect ect. How do people feel when you make a mistake, are they just happy you try? If someone hypothetically just said Welsh words with English grammar would people be super weirded out(not that I would do that). If someone had a native accent but very bad grammar would people think they were a native but in a different dialect?

Thanks, I am just really curious about this stuff.

[JohnYoung]

I would say that generally 1st language speakers know what sounds normal, rather than being experts in grammar (apart from teachers). The same as us with English, really. So they will speak using the accepted pattern for the area where they live or come from.

The vast majority of Welsh speakers will love the fact that we are trying and they will understand us. OK, so we might sound a bit like a new speaker or a person from another area, but that won’t be a problem. A bit like say, a Romanian person or even a person with a strong British regional dialect speaking English.

OK, so a tiny minority might say something, but then that person would also probably comment on our English dialects

[siaronjames]

From experience, I can truthfully say that there are definitely Welsh first-language speakers who feel their Welsh is full of mistakes - I have come across people who are nervous about speaking to learners because they feel learners speak better than they do, and people who are reluctant to be interviewed for TV because their Welsh “isn’t good enough” (and of course in both cases, their Welsh is perfectly fine!).

As John said, most first-language speakers are only too happy to hear someone attempting Welsh, and there are many mistakes that their ears would automatically iron-out - wrong gender or wrong mutation for instance. That said, I’d say that of all the grammar ‘rules’ maybe the main thing that would cause the most confusion (and give the impression of “weirding-out”) would be using English word order with Welsh words. This is only because it really does sound so wrong to the Welsh ear and having to pause to re-arrange the words into Welsh order in their heads before responding, or simply giving up and turning to English to be ‘helpful’ can dishearten the learner.

All in all though, I’d say that the majority of Welsh first-language speakers think about Welsh grammar when they speak as much as the majority of English first-language speakers think about English grammar when they speak… in other words, hardly ever!