As a teenager I listened to John Peel and heard all these Welsh language bands that I still absolutely love…Datblygu being the main reason for me wanting to learn this beautiful language!
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Moving to London at an early age, I missed the opportunity to continue learning Welsh although I have tried to retain the little that I knew. Now, after many false starts, I feel I have found the course needed to fulfill my ambition to enlarge my knowledge of the language and keep my brain active at the ripe age of 89.
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i want to be a Welsh speaker because I love Wales, the Welsh language, the heritage and myths
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Datblygu has been the motivation for a few of our new Welsh speakers, e.g. @gisella-albertini 
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I want to speak Welsh because I moved to West Wales in 2019 and feel more at home here than anywhere else I’ve ever lived (and I’ve lived in 4 countries on 3 continents!). I was (ignorantly) so surprised when I found that everyone here speaks Welsh as a first language. I’d visited South Wales many times before - we used to holiday there most years - and it appears to an outsider that Welsh is spoken a little but not commonly. It’s much different here, and Welsh is spoken everywhere.
I feel very much part of the community here already so it feels odd not being able to speak to people in the language they speak to each other. So I would like to!
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The answer I came up with at the beginning of the course for why I want to speak Welsh was ‘I want to be a Welsh speaker because I feel I lost something when my grandparents decided that Welsh as a first language was of no use, and they’d raise us to speak only English instead’. And although that’s true, the more I’ve been thinking about it over the following weeks, the more I’ve realised that’s not quite enough.
I grew up in Wrexham, where everybody I knew spoke English with me, even my grandparents (who were from Anglesey and whose first language was Welsh). And I remember our teachers in primary school tearing their hair out over our ‘bad’ English, and telling us we’d never work on the telly if we spoke like that. As if anyone from Queen’s Park was ever going to read the news on the BBC! But anyway…
I left Wales at 17 to go to Uni, and never returned. I ended up living overseas, and now after forty years I’m retiring back to Europe next year. I gave up on coming back to Wales, because the U.K. position on immigration makes it a bit difficult with an immigrant spouse, so we’re going to Ireland.
I started learning Irish during the pandemic, because I don’t want to feel like a tourist forever in my new home, and I came across Hiberno English for the first time. This is basically just the name for the form of English that is commonly spoken in Ireland, and as I was coming to it from a British background, the only times I’d heard it before were from stereotypically Irish characters in British TV shows, whose ‘bad’ English was part of their hokey charm. But as I learned Irish, I understood that Hiberno English isn’t ‘bad’ English, it’s the kind of English you speak when the words you’re using are in English but the construction of the language reflects a residual memory of the way things are expressed in Irish.
That took me back to the ‘bad’ English that we were always getting corrected on when I was a kid, and it occurred to me that a lot of our ‘bad’ English - like putting the part of the sentence we wish to emphasize at the beginning of the the sentence even when that is a very unnatural word order in standard English, or using a singular noun to count some things even when there’s more than one of them, or a propensity for using double negatives - was just the way a community speaks English when the words come from English but their usage comes from Welsh.
That made me realise how very recent - in historical terms - the loss of Welsh and the adoption of English really is. I thought that if Welsh is close enough to us that we still preserve a residual memory of it in the way we use English, surely it’s close enough for me to claw it back and speak it again. That’s why I want to speak Welsh, and that’s why I’m here at SSiW.
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I want to be a welsh speaker because when i retire i will be moving to Wales, where i hope to be able to speak Welsh as part of my everyday life.
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My Grandad was a first language Welsh speaker. My Mum learned Welsh at school for a while but after moving to England didn’t continue. As a child the conversations between my Granddad and Uncle Ephraim used to fascinate me, the way they switched so effortlessly between English and Welsh sometimes mid sentence. My Granddad did teach me a little Welsh, I wish I’d got him to teach me more. He was always teasing my grandmother about how Welsh word order was more logical than English. 'What’s more important he would say, that it’s brown or that it’s a dog?
I did sing the Welsh National Anthem for him one Christmas when he was very poorly with Alzheimers. I hadn’t been able to find a class so I wrote it out phonetically after listening to Aled Jones many times. I’m sure my pronunciation was all over the place but I will never forget his smile.
I want to learn Welsh because of my heritage, I like a challenge and I live about 40 minutes from the border with Wales so I am hoping to visit often and hopefully have lots of conversations and make new friends
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I want to be a welsh speaker because I have moved to a beautiful village in north wales and think it is important to at least attempt to speak the language of the people who live here.
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I want to be a Welsh Speaker because I want to greet people in our native language as I walk the Welsh Coastal Path (…and order a coffee too!!)
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That’s quite a journey you’ve been on, Ceris! Hope you have a great time in Ireland, and manage to make it over to practise your Welsh sometimes
That’s really beautiful, Jill - well done! 
Thank you for that positive attitude, Mark, hugely appreciated
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Definitely. I’ll be a regular on the Holyhead and Fishguard ferries.
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I want to be a Welsh speaker because… I enjoy learning something new, it is good for my brain, and it will help me become more a part of my community in North Wales (where I just recently moved)!
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I’ll be able to interact more with people in my community!
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because I want to keep my brain active into old age. And learning a new language seems like an appropriate challenge. And Welsh because I am not likely to go any further away.
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I want to be a Welsh speaker because I’m an early years teacher and I really want to share the language with the children I teach.
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I want to be a Welsh speaker because it was my Gran’s first language, my mum knew some and all I knew were a few curses. It will be a link to them and keep my brain active. I would like to go into a shop in Wales and speak some Welsh with confidence. I’ve started but it felt awkward and a bit embarrassing though people’s response was very positive. I live in England so chances to practice few and far between.
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On week 16 now, and this was the first one I managed to do all in one go! The previous ones I had to do in chunks to give a chance for my brain to stop aching
I want to be a Welsh speaker because I teach history (distance learning on-line) at a Welsh university although I don’t live in Wales, and would like to be able to talk to colleagues and other university staff when I spend time at Lampeter.
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I want to learn Welsh because it should be my birth right being Welsh. By learning Welsh I hope to be able to watch S4C and listen to Welsh radio (and actually understand what is going on!). 
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I am Welsh. I live in England now, but my Mam still lives in Wales. But Mam doesn’t speak Welsh either.
I want to be able to hold a conversation in my native tongue, even if I make mistakes.
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