Despite writing almost an essay, I somehow didn’t answer this question.
The camera guy made us do about 5 mins of handshaking, from all sorts of angles - which is funny because they didn’t get used in the end.
There were no specific filming of my hands, so I’m assuming they did this while I was talking 
Thanks Nicky for your generous response and offer! I’m ready when you are!
@violetsnow You, too!
I’m embroiled in a password reset issue with Microsoft!
Give me a message in 3 or 4 days and hopefully it’ll all be sorted.
Da iawn ti, @Nicky! Really impressive after onlly 5 months - congratulations! And thanks for giving us the “behind the scenes” perspective, too
Wow! Da iawn i chi @Nicky! Dach chi’n siarad yn dda iawn gyda lawr o hyder! Dwi’m siŵr os dwi’n gallu gwneud hynny! Shwt wnaethoch chi’n hala’r pum mis? Llawer a lawer o ymarfer siarad gyda bobl a gwneud camgymeriadau? Unrhyw trefn dyddiol?
Oes gyda chi unrhyw cyngor arall am bobl 'ma?
Woow! Well done @Nicky! You speak with so much confidence and so well! I’m not sure that I could do that! How did you spend the five months? Lots and lots of mistakes and practice speaking to people? Any daily routine?
Do you have any other advice for people here?
Hi @cwningen. It was five months when I did the interview, but its a bit over six months for me now.
SSiW was the first proper Welsh I had done. We did Welsh at primary school, but the only thing I remembered from this was “I am Nicky” and “Thanks”, so my starting level was again, essentially zero.
I downloaded the SSiW app - and I tried to do on average about two lessons a day. Some days when work or life was quiet I’d do 4 or 5, some days when I was too busy I’d do none - it all kind of averaged out at about 2 lessons a day. (as of today, I’ve done (what I’ll call…) new course, old course and the vocab units twice through to completion.) I did Old Course 3, Lesson 25 for the second time last night while having a walk around Aber.
I was very keen on not repeating lessons. If I got about 75% right, I would move on straight away - having confidence that if there was something I wasn’t 100% on - it would either come up again in the future, or it would make sense in my head in a couple of days.
I started to try and expose myself to Welsh as much as possible, in both active and passive manners. So I’d try and put Radio Cymru on in the background as much as possible. I would listen to talk/call in shows, at the beginning only being able to pick out two or three words in every sentence, but as my listening skills improved I started to get the jist of it, before then getting to a stage where I understood about 80-90% of what was being said.
I started watching S4C a lot! and everything. My wife and I are hooked on Pobol Y Cwm and other “grown up” shows, but at the same time, we also started watching kids shows like “Hafod Haul” and “Cyw”. The reasoning being, we thought we spoke like Welsh infants, so why not watch shows aimed at Welsh infants. I know this something a lot of adult learners are not happy about doing, but I can’t recommend it enough.
I started a YouTube channel called “Learn Welsh with Nicky”, which is ironic because I don’t teach anything! I made it as 1) a way for me to document my learning progress and most importantly 2) to give me something that I felt some kind of pressure to keep up with. (Reason being: if I, for some reason stopped doing Welsh - then I’d have subscribers who would be wondering where I’d gone?)
I work from home, and when work gets busy I can kind of go weeks at a time without seeing anyone other than my wife and our guinea pigs - and especially when I was living in South Wales, the channel gave me the opportunity to practice my Welsh speaking when I wasn’t necessarily surrounded by other Welsh speakers.
A few months ago I moved to Aberystwyth, a place - which although still quite “Anglicized”, is a place where the use of the Welsh language is far more widely seen on the street. So when we moved here, my wife (also learning) made the decision to try (as much as is possible) to live our lives through the medium of Welsh. This really forced us to get quite comfortable with the language in a quick way.
We decided that we’d allow our selves to use “English dictionary words” if we really didn’t know certain words, but the structure and format of all of our language HAD to be Welsh. There’s a bit in the video where I start to try and say “If one person watches this…” and I realise that I don’t know the word for person yet (funny, because it is in fact “person”), so I quickly slip to using “If a man, or a woman watches this…” and I think that is key to it all really. You may feel like you have a limited vocabulary, but it’s all about stretching what you do have and making the most of the words you have at your disposal.
If you are practising Welsh with someone, the important thing for me would be to make sure that you are making “new discussion” in Welsh. What do I mean by this? It’s hard to describe, but I’ll give it a shot by here.
When my wife and I first started trying to speak to each other in Welsh in our old house in the Rhondda, we’d use Welsh for things like “Do you want a coffee?” “Shall we go for a walk later?” and “We need more bread when we go shopping” - but the tendency was that if started talking about stuff that wasn’t day to day… i.e “Have you seen your sister’s new haircut on Facebook. What the hell is that all about?” we would revert back to English. I don’t know whether that was because we didn’t feel comfortable using ‘different’ phrases at that time - but luckily, that has all changed now.
Finally, as I said in the video. Finding someone to practice with was really important for us, especially if you can find someone who isn’t doing SSiW, because you’ll start getting exposed to vocab that isn’t covered here yet.
The final thing? Variety is the spice of life. My wife and I both did the Southern course - and we both had a similar vocabulary. Our Welsh skills shot through the roof when we moved to Aber and started practising with friends here because we started finding friends who grew up in Carmarthen, one who grew up in Ynys Mon, another who grew up in Aberaeron, another from Machynlleth - all of whom are fluent Welsh speakers, but speak very differently from each other.
The first time I ever spoke to my friend Llio from Caernarfon for example, I felt like a complete beginner again - because despite the fact I could speak and understand fellow hwntw’s (South Walians) great, when I was listening to her it was just so difficult at first (sorry Northerners!).
A few weeks of practice, a few weeks of “Sorry, can you say that again?” and I mostly know what she’s saying to me. I feel good because she doesn’t feel the need that she has to slow down or adapt her language in order to make herself understood to me.
I feel I’m danger of going into essay territory again here, which I have a tendency to do on the forums so I’ll bullet point these for clarity.
Do the lessons, have confidence in the process. You will come out of the other end a superb speaker.
Don’t let a pattern hold you back. If you are used to doing one lesson a day, or one lesson a week - but you find yourself with a spare hour here and there, do another lesson!
Expose yourself to Welsh as much as possible.
First language Welsh speakers don’t care if you make mistakes - and they are always massively willing to help. Set boundaries with them, if you want them to stop you and correct you, let them know. If you want them to just carry on, let them know.
Stretch the vocab you do have, rather than worrying about knowing every single word. If your English side wants to say “I feel starving and I fancy something nice” but your Welsh side doesn’t know it exactly, just say “I want food and I want something nice” - sounds primal, but it’s better than not using Welsh. This skill will allow you to adapt your language ‘in your head, on the fly’
Don’t feel you have to know EVERYTHING before speaking with real people. I know people who have been learning for upwards of 5+ years who still haven’t spoken outside of a classroom. On the flipside, I was down my local Welsh language bookshop before even finishing Course 1, Challenge 6 - using the limited Welsh I had at my disposal. I started my Youtube channel after about two weeks of learning and I was in pubs buying pints in Welsh before finishing Course 1.
The “toolbox”. There’s a “toolbox” I give to everyone who comes to our weekly learner chat sessions in Aber. It essentially is a piece of A4 paper filled with phrases that can save you if a conversation is about to either die, or fall back into English. If you can get these certain phrases memorised, they will always help you when you need help, but they allow you to keep the conversation in Welsh. These are things like:
I’m sorry I didn’t hear that? Can you say it again?
I’m sorry, I’m still learning Welsh. Can you repeat that?
Can you speak a little slower for me? I have trouble hearing.
I’m going to try this phrase on you.
What is the word in Welsh for ‘something’?
How do you say ‘something’ in Welsh?
Can you tell me if you understand this?
Simple phrases, but absolutely worth their weight in gold as they can save a conservation that is on its last legs
I hope this has helped If I’ve missed anything, please feel free to comment back
Gwych! Mae hynny yn ddiddorol a lawer o wybodaeth ddefnyddiol iawn! Diolch o galon i chi am ysgrifennu hwn! Joies i ddarllen y stori 'ma
Great! That’s some really useful information and very interesting. Thank you very very much for writing this down, I enjoyed reading it!