I had a feeling as I wrote the posts above that someone would say “You’re over-thinking it”, and perhaps I am, @tatjana. You have a point.
The problem is, you can’t UN-know what you know. We’re all the sum of our backgrounds and native languages and experiences, and we bring all those things to our learning of a new language. Sure, you can try to relax and go with the flow, but you can’t NOT know what you already know. Language analysis comes as naturally to me as breathing, so when I encounter a sound in an unfamiliar language, I mentally tuck it away into its appropriate phonological category without even consciously thinking about it.
And I DID try to relax and go with the flow with this course - and look where it got me! Pronouncing “ddim” with the English “v”, pronouncing “prun-ni” as “thrun-ni” because “pr” sounds like “thr”, thinking “gall-i” was “gach-i”… Going with the flow has already produced too many wrong turns that easily could have turned into permanent bad habits, given that I don’t have any Welsh speakers nearby to correct me. If I hadn’t come here to the forum and written this post, I’d still be thinking “ddim” is the same as English “vim”. And I’d be thinking that forever, because if it still sounds like “vim” to me after four full lessons, despite Iestyn and Cat saying it slowly and carefully, that’s not likely to change, especially when their speech starts speeding up.
I’m still pronouncing it as “vim” now, even though I now know it’s ddim. I was running through sentences in my mind last night in bed, and every time, “ddim” came out as “vim” before I could correct it. I say dwi-ddim-in, ti-ddim-in, dwi-ddim-in, ti-ddim-in to myself over and over again, but as soon as I try use it in a sentence of any complexity (anything longer than “I don’t speak” or “you don’t say”), out comes dwi-vim-in and ti-vim-in. Every single time. It’s a difficult habit to break, but I’m trying very hard to break it. And the maddening thing is, it’s a habit I never would have acquired in the first place if only I had been able to hear the word properly.
So I hope you can understand why I’m so reluctant to acquire any more bad habits just because I can’t hear the instructor properly. It’s one thing to hear a word correctly and then get it wrong because you forget, or because your tongue struggles to wrap itself around a sound that doesn’t occur in your native language, or whatever. Those are all natural parts of learning any language. You shrug it off and try again. Practice overcomes it in the end. It’s quite another thing to get it wrong and never have the chance to get it right because you can’t hear. It’s frustrating, and all the practice in the world will never overcome that, because you have no idea you’re doing it wrongly.
Hearing loss is the most maddening thing. When I’m at, say, a party, or when someone is speaking to me with their face turned away, I feel like I’m in a cage made of thick glass, tapping on it and trying to understand what people outside are saying. Hearing loss cuts you off from people. (Helen Keller said “Blindness separates people from things. Deafness separates people from people”. She was right.)
And my hearing loss is still only very mild. Extremely mild. I manage perfectly well in quiet surroundings where I can see the person’s mouth as they speak. I take my hat off to @MarilynHames who has managed to become fluent in a second language with such profound hearing loss.
@Flynn, yes, I agree, making mistakes is how we learn as children - see my very first post on this page where I referred to how children acquire language - but children have two advantages that I don’t have have here. One is the ability to see the person speak (unless the child is vision-impaired). The second advantage they have, vision-impaired or not, is someone listening and gently correcting and coaching them. We don’t have that here in these lessons. Iestyn and Cat can’t hear me getting it wrong. The result is I’m blissfully unaware I’m getting it wrong, when with just a tiny bit more of a hint - “That sound at the beginning of ddim is the same th sound at the beginning of this and that” - it never would have been a problem at all. I’d never even have started pronouncing it “vim”. That’s why I’m feeling frustrated.
If Aran or Iestyn are reading this thread: please take on board the problems that hearing-impaired people have, and consider giving some kind of visual aid to learning, such as a short video accompanying each lesson with a close-up of the instructor’s mouth pronouncing each new word. Not the entire lesson - just the vocabulary list, with each word pronounced once or maybe twice. You could easily fit the whole vocabulary list for each lesson into a 60-second video.
Anyway. I feel I’ve flogged this horse long enough, and if I’m going to continue the course at all, I need to get off this thread and get back to the actual lessons. I’ll study all the links everyone has provided, I’ll think about whether repeating lessons 1 to 4 will be productive for me (I don’t really want to, but I MUST break this “vim” habit somehow), and we will see what happens. Thank you again to everyone for your suggestions and encouragement.
