I wonder if it’s OK to replace the repeated listening to one downloaded soundfile with, say, the very wonderful Mwmin cartoons on S4c?
With the Welsh subtitles I can almost understand them, even though I’m very much a beginner.
And 5 minutes a day goes by very quickly!
@jacky-8 Ooh, I didn’t know there were Mwmin cartoons on S4C! I’m a big Mwmin fan!
But with regards to your question, you’ll get most benefit if you do both. The Listening Practices are designed to give you only words and phrases you’re already familiar with, so your brain isn’t having to work out new vocabulary at the same time. It’s allowing the auditory processing part of your brain to start working faster.
Listening to the Mwmins, as well as being delightful, will also give you new vocabulary which you’ll learn in context, the best way!
It would be worth you doing an experiment - try doing the double-speed Listening Practice before you listen to the Mwmins and see if you understand more.
I reckon the more listening you can do the better! My car radio is set to Radio Cymru (unless my partner’s been driving somewhere and it’s been retuned to Radio 4!) To begin with, it was all just sound with the odd recognisable word or phrase in there. But over time I started to pick out words and then whole sentences, and one say I noticed that I had understood a whole segment. But all of this while concentrating on driving - I wasn’t trying to understand it, it was just gently seeping into my brain.
It also exposed me to a whole range of different accents and dialects and registers - the whole gamut of the Welsh language - which is really important with such a beautifully varied language as this.
But as @Deborah-SSi points out, this is doing a slightly different job from the listening exercises (which didn’t exist when I was first learning, so I’m a bit envious…), so I agree that both is better!
Thanks for posting this! I never knew they were on S4C. I watched a couple of episodes this morning. Used to love the Moomin books as a kid, the animations are fantastic, and now I can learn Welsh from them as well!