Instagram and other practice ideas

I recently started to use my Instagram account that I’ve had for a number of years but never posted anything on, and I thought an interesting way to practice Welsh would be to comment my photographs in Welsh. One of the interesting things is that it makes me think about how to word things so that I don’t end up just looking up lots and lots of words to say things exactly as I might in English. For example, I’d say my dog is “tired” rather than “snoozy”. It will be interesting to see if anyone sends me corrections!

The other change I’ve made, is that I’ve switched my Facebook account to display in Welsh. Not much point in me posting in Welsh there, as none of my friends would understand it anyway, but it does make me think about what things mean.

Is anybody else doing anything similar? Has anyone set the language of their phone to Cymraeg, writing notes around the house in Welsh, or using fridge magnets to make Welsh words? I’d like to hear any similar little learning habits you have.

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In my job I have to carry out lots of informal interviews and obviously I take notes. Occasionally the person I am interviewing looks at my notes whilst I am writing so, when that happens, I write anything critical in Welsh (I live in London so rarely come across Welsh speakers, though I may be caught out one day). The only downside is that I can hardly read my writing in English writing so sometimes I can’t even work out the Welsh word I have written!! I also changed Microsoft Office to Welsh but found that incredibly challenging when trying to something complicated in Excel or Powerpoint.

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I’ve been writing a daily Tumblr blog for all the Welsh I’ve been learning since I started back in July last year, that’s been by far the biggest help to me :slight_smile:

Sadly iOs doesn’t have Welsh as an option for phone language yet but I have found trying to Google stuff in Welsh can inject a little bit of extra vocab learning instead!

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I started a blog too. It was supposed to be my experiences of learning Welsh, but it started to turn into me almost giving lessons about mutations, etc, which was not at all what I intended it to be. So I took a step back and thought a bit more before writing a post, so that it was more about me learning and less about exactly what I was learning.

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Ah I see! I started with something similar to you but funnily enough we’ve gone opposite ways with it :smiley: I’ve started making song lyric/TV programme etc. vocab lists and have grammar posts planned, I think I just learn best by teaching :slight_smile: Is your blog still going? I’d love to take a look if so.

It’s still going, primarily because I only started it a month or so ago. I think there are only about seven posts! I started it partly to document how I was finding learning, and partly as programming practice in PHP, as I work as a software developer.

I’m not sure I’m ready to link to it yet, though… perhaps when it’s a bit more together!

God sorry this reply is so late! Been a bit snowed under with exams :’)
No worries, best of luck with it! :slight_smile: