I finally finished finished challenge one!

Welsh General / Questions
#1

I finally finished challenge one!! I only pressed pause once!! I feel so proud of myself! On to challenge 2!!

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#2

Llongyfarchiadau! Congratulations! And welcome to the start of a long and happy adventure…

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#3

Llongyfarchiadau mawr! (big congrats)! I’m happy for you. Yes, now on to Challenge 2! See you at the end of it. :slight_smile:

Hwyl!
Tatjana :slight_smile:

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#4

Awesome - well done, Ann Marie!

Um… when you say ‘finally’… how many times did you go through it? :slight_smile:

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#5

Many… lol! I am a stickler I have to get it perfectly. I also practice really late at night after a long day and my brain is pretty done by than. Lol! :joy:

#6

I’m a bit like that too, but the SSiW method really comes into it’s own when you forget about perfection; just pressing on madly, making lots of mistakes and getting out of your comfort zone. Iti s worth doing this

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#7

This is like driving with brakes on, honestly - you’re not meant to get all the phrases right, you’re meant to let the spaced repetition that’s built into it build your memories over time - you might find that if, instead of thinking in terms of going 11111111111 222222222222 33333333333 etc, you try going 123456789101234567891012345678910 etc, your progress will become much faster (and you’ll almost certainly find out that you don’t really need to revisit the earlier lessons once you’ve given the spaced repetition enough room to work)… :slight_smile:

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#8

Thanks for the tip. I found the only way I can really remember things is if I write it down on note cards it actually helps. I know it is easier to do just mix it up, but I am the type of person who has to have order when learning stuff lol! If it is all jumbled up I get confused. But I guess it’s always good fo try new things:)

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#9

@annmariegarone84 I understand where you are coming from because I’m a perfectionist, too. I had a hard time letting myself make mistakes and believing that I would learn if I didn’t repeat the lessons. But speaking from experience, you really can trust the spaced repetition. I think you will surprise yourself if you try just moving forward as Aran suggests. And if you really feel like you need to go back at some point, you always can…the lessons will be there waiting for you :slight_smile:

I also understand that it’s harder at the end of a long day…you don’t necessarily have to do a whole lesson at one time, either! :wink:

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#10

You were right! I just finished listening to challenge two and they do repeat everything enough where you don’t need to listen to it constantly. It is different than challenge one that’s for sure. :slight_smile:

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#11

The thing is, with language that can only get you so far - and then at some point you’ll be in a real conversation, and those things always get messy…:wink:

So what we’re trying to do is to prepare you as well as possible for that experience…:slight_smile:

A lot of the things that feel helpful aren’t necessarily effective - I recommend reading Dr Robert Bjork on ‘desirable difficulties’ on that front - although of course you need to feel happy enough to carry on doing the work.

Good luck, and keep us posted on how it goes!

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#12

I have felt the same way, but this thread has helped me realise that all I am doing is learning the lesson, not the language and it’s patterns etc.
This weekend I will move on, mistakes and all.
Challenge 2 here I come!

Thanks for the nudge.

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#13

Great decision… :slight_smile:

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#14

Congratulations!

I understand your need to feel you’ve totally perfected the lesson content before moving on to the next one, but I agree with what everyone else is saying: you truly will make faster progress if you accept whatever mistakes you’re making and push on.

In my opinion, if you’re getting more than half of each sentence correct, even if you got hardly any of the longer sentences 100% correct, you’re doing well enough to start the next lesson. If you’re getting around 80% of each sentence correct, you’re definitely doing well enough. There’s enough repetition in the later lessons to give you many, many more chances at getting right whatever it was you got wrong the first time.

I do use the pause button - but I use it to give myself time to collect my thoughts and speak before Cat’s voice kicks in. And I do often repeat lessons, but never with the goal of perfection - only to get myself to a certain level of relative comfort. If I tackle the next lesson, or the one after that, but I’ve gone too fast and I reach the point where I’m saying almost nothing, then I know it’s time to go back and repeat an earlier lesson. If I can manage to speak most of the time, and most of what I say is correct, then that’s good enough for the moment. Press on.

A few things which helped me shed my perfectionist tendencies:

  • Accept Iestyn’s excellent advice: “In later lessons, you’ll find yourself replacing your original mistakes with newer and more interesting mistakes”. You can still be making great progress even if you rarely get anything but the very shortest sentences 100% right. You won’t really be aware of it, but the things you got wrong in the early lessons are things you will be getting right in the later ones - you’re now just getting slightly more complicated things wrong! And eventually you’ll get those right too, while getting yet more complicated things wrong - all in the same sentence.

  • Try a thought experiment. Think of mistakes as a kind of quota. I got this idea from whichever artist it was who said “We all have 10,000 bad drawings inside us. The sooner we get them out, the better.” Imagine you’ve got 10,000 mistakes inside of you, and you MUST get every single one of them out before you can call yourself proficient in Welsh. Whenever you make a mistake, try thinking “Another one down; only 9,892 mistakes to go”. That way, mistakes become stepping stones on the path to proficiency, rather than hurdles blocking your way.

  • Teach someone what you’ve learned. You’ll discover you’ve actually understood and remembered far more than you thought you had, and that will give you the confidence to press on. The person you’re teaching doesn’t need to be someone who understands. If you don’t have a partner or child or friend who is patient enough to listen, then do you have a toddler in the house? Get a pile of Lego, sit down with them, and say your Welsh sentences while you’re playing. They’ll probably want to imitate you. Practise the trickier sounds with them, such as [ll] and [r] and [ch]. Do you have a dog? While you’re walking or stroking the dog, explain in your own words how the Welsh sentences you’ve learned are constructed: “When we want to talk about ourselves in the present, we start with Dw i’n… It’s actually made up of a few smaller words, but we pronounce it almost like it’s a word of one syllable. Dw i’n. Now, if we want to make the sentence negative, we pull the 'n off the end, stick in a ddim, which means “no” or “not”, and glue it all back together, with the 'n now getting its full weight as a syllable: yn. So now we have Dw i ddim yn…” The dog, of course, doesn’t understand a word, but that’s fine - you’re not really explaining it to the dog, you’re explaining it to yourself. No toddler or dog? Then just pretend you have an audience. You’re a teacher of Welsh, explaining to a class of novices whatever it is you’ve just learned. Give them some sample sentences. Try and make up some sample sentences that weren’t in the lesson you heard. Pretend one or two of your class haven’t understood the concept. Is there a different way you can explain it to them? I do this imaginary role-playing almost daily. It helps clarify what I’ve heard in the audio lessons, it helps me make sense of Welsh grammar (it’s interesting how my “lessons” to my imaginary class get refined over time as I learn more!), and above all, it helps me remember Welsh words and phrases, so that I don’t need to repeat the lessons as much.

Whatever you do to help you make faster progress, I wish you every success.

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#15

I have always found that the best way to learn anything is to teach someone else! Part way through trying to explain all one’s own confusion is blown away! “Oh, I see!” I would cry to my confused mother, and go away, leaving her wondering what I’d been talking about!

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