Hi, I’ve just started relearning Welsh (I learnt it in school in 1970’s, but moved away). I’ve bought Heini Gruffudd’s Live Welsh. It seems so different from the Welsh I learnt at school! I can see the author is obviously well-respected, I just thought I’d ask if anyone has any experience using this book. Thanks, Mandy
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Croeso to the Forum, Mandy. I cannot be sure, but as Heini was born and raised iin Swansea and, i think, aims to teach colloquial Welsh as spoken, not literary Welsh, I’d expect his books to be somewhat favouring south central/west and to be informal! I believe that in the 70s there was an effort to teach a sort of ‘standard’ Welsh and it was a lot more based on the read word rather than the spoken word! I’m sure others are better informed. It is ages since I read anything of his!
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Diolch yn fawr. That’s helpful.
Mandy. I’m in a similar position to you - brought up in Wales but lived away all my adult life. All ‘Learn Welsh’ material I’ve seen is very different now from the Welsh I learnt at school. I’m told the school method has also changed.
The emphasis, in written material and in classes, is upon conversational/informal Welsh rather than grammatically correct Welsh. It makes learning more difficult in some respects because the same thing may be shortened in several different ways - which can be problematic when listening to spoken Welsh.
Heini Gruffudd is from Swansea, went to uni in Aberystwyth in the 60s and then back to Swansea. My impression is that the colloquial Welsh in his books/CDs has a West Wales/Carmarthenshire influence.
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There has been a copy of this on my desk neigbours desk for the last six months. Sadly she hasn’t done much more than the occasional glance :O( However today was great as the office has started using little bits of Welsh, not really started by me. I hear ‘Pam?’ ‘Diolch’ ‘Bore da’ ‘Beth?’ ‘Dim problem’, I don’t know what’s happened, but we seem to have some ‘Live Welsh’ in the office!
I have had a quick glance through, it looks good as a fun introduction to Welsh book. I bought some of the earlier Gruffudd books in an earlier attempt to speak Welsh, if only for the cartoons! I think they’ll be helpful as basic core grammar as something to back up SSiW of course.
And a huge Croeso / Welcome to the forum! 
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Yes, @henddraig - school Welsh in the 70s was, frankly, rubbish. I got great grades, but couldn’t use it to speak with my family at all. They kept saying, “We don’t say that.” It didn’t help that “school Welsh” in my case seemed to be South Welsh and I was living in the North; but, beyond that, it was just really stilted and formal.
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Diolch. I don’t mind about the West Wales/Carmarthenshire link as I grew up in Carmarthen. I was just confused as I didn’t seem to recognise some of the basics, eg.fi’n mynd (I thought it was rydw i’n mynd), but if this is the Welsh people are speaking that’s ok! Thanks for getting back to me.
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Diolch yn fawr. I’m going to give it a try!
I just wanted to make sure it really was the welsh people speak as it was so different from my schoolgirl Welsh. i just skimmed through book yesterday and there are phrases like ‘fi di cysgu’ instead of ‘rydw i wedi cysgu’.
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Oh Mandy, I feel for you! I went through that journey in stages! You’ve hit it head on with no warning! I have never met anyone who says “rydw i wedi cysgi”!. I moved through ‘ydw i wedi…’ to ‘dw i wedi’ and have not quite used ‘fi di’ because I’m an old fashioned aged crone, but I do know folk speak like that and never, ever, as @margaretwerdermann says, like 70s school Welsh, which was even worse than 50s school French!!
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Thats the great thing about a forum like this, learning from other people’s experiences!
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Hi, I had exactly the same experience … taught gramatically correct, South Welsh, which seemed to have absolutely no relevance to “real” Welsh up here in the North! Like you, I couldn’t understand a word 
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Exactly. The only member of my family who could speak Welsh was my great uncle who lived in Surrey. He was always keen to speak Welsh with me, as I was doing Welsh in school. We never understood each other as my sentences seemed alien to him, partly because they were ‘School Welsh’.
It’s a very interesting point as there is this formal colloquiol Welsh that gets taught and there is ‘Street Welsh’ how people actually use the language.
The interesting thing about SSiW in my opinion is that it strides this divide. SSiW gives us enough formality for our brains to work out the patterns, but also helps us bridge across to how Welsh is spoken in the wild. I think the course does a good job at this.
For example we are taught ‘wedi’ here, but I hear ‘di’ in the wild and Aran gives us exposure to 'di sometimes.
I suppose it depends on how formally you like to learn things or whether you are more interested in being able to understand people speaking more quickly.
Me colleague was working in London today so I didn’t get the chance to have another look at the book, but I think it does teach real ‘live’ Welsh and the basic grammar of how live Welsh works. Really everything is useful, it; just learning how to use resources effectively.
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