Listening to radio cymru

I am on challenge 13 level 2. I’m listening to radio cymru for the 30 minutes listening exercise. Sometimes I understand the conversation (not all the words though) and even laughed at a joke which I understood!. Then other times I’ll only know one word, and then I have to rack my brain to remember what it is. I’m am struggling with we don’t, we didn’t, we wanted, and then wanted changes from oeddan I isio, to bohe isio in the middle of a sentence. I’m so muddled, that I’ve now forgotten I shouldn’t, I couldn’t. I cant attend the speaking practices as I have different shift patterns, and a sick dog. I do practice once a week with another learner, and we chat away in Welsh very well, with the odd English word. I’m going to a welsh speaking town for two days, I’m going to speak Welsh, and just hope I don’t make a fool of myself.

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You describe very well my own experience of listening to the radio. :grin:

However I can also tell that with practice, more and more words and sentences will make sense, it’s all about practice and persistence.

And I would add: don’t worry too much about making a fool of yourself when you try to speak. I’m pretty sure it happens to everybody learning a language. Or I can tell for sure that it did happen to me many times, starting with English in England first as a kid, then more recently with Welsh in Wales. It’s part of the process, and will help you improve. And if you take it lightly, you’ll just have a laugh at it later as a fluent speaker! :wink:

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Hello gesella, diolch yn fawr, youve made me feel a lot better about it all. Thank you for sharing your experiences with me, I really appreciate it. I hope I get to be fluent, I’m thinking I can, but then I come upon a block like now, but as you said, it’s normal. Diolch eto. :grinning:

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I’m learning Basque at the moment, and it’s only the fact that I’ve gone through the process of understanding nothing at all on Radio Cymru, to picking out words, then sentences, then understanding everything, that I don’t despair listening to Euskal Irratia - the Basque language radio station.

I’ve been listening for 9 months, and I’m still at the ‘picking odd words’ stage, mostly with no idea what they’re talking about. I’m sure if I hadn’t already been through this process once with Welsh, I would have given up by now, but I know that it DOES come, and you DO get there!

I also have plenty of totally blank moments when someone speaks Basque to me, and I often talk myself into a deadend trying to explain something that I don’t have the words for, but it’s all part of the language-learning process.

Enjoy your visit to the Welsh-speaking town!

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