I have written a very short book about garden birds for intermediate learners, like myself, as a way to help you expand your vocabulary.
Each chapter contains an annotated illustration of the bird in question, around 200 words about its habitat, diet and/or breeding habits, and a word list.
It’s available as an ebook, so if you want to treat yourself for Christmas, it’s just £1.99 from here: https://seidrpress.com/
I’ve also posted about it on social media, and would be grateful if anyone who’s on those platforms could give these posts a share:
“I do all my best proofreading after I hit sned.”
It’s painfully true. You know what you intended to write, and so that is what you see. Our brains are all too good at rearranging things into what we expect them to be.
I bought a copy last night, but have only had a chance for a quick look at it: first impressions are that it looks very good on Apple Books on a 27" Studio monitor and the notes / vocab are going to be really useful and interesting.
I’m looking forward to studying it properly (apart from anything else, I probably couldn’t name many of the birds on sight in English either…)
I mean, I’m an ex-journalist. I spent years writing columns for magazines, and articles for the mainstream music, tech and news media, but it’s literally impossible to write anything, even in English, that doesn’t have a typo in it somewhere!!
And I’m not yet clued in enough with Welsh to spot the typos without reading very, very, very carefully. And sometimes (cleary!) not even then!
Just bought a copy. Works great on Windows using the free Thorium reader, haven’t tried on my Anroid devices yet. Gorgeous pictures, and lost of very useful vocabulary. I’ll finally get to learn something about birds! A great little book.
I don’t know of a version of UMW in both languages (there is a Welsh only version called Dan y Wenallt), but if you go to https://www.ylolfa.com/en and search with the term “bilingual”, there are others that come up on a variety of topics, particularly the Cyfres Cip ar Gymru / Wonder Wales series.
Former professional editor and proofreader here - I do not think there is a publication in existence that doesn’t have an error in it somewhere (even if it’s something like a space before a punctuation mark, or an italic comma that should be roman). And it’s always the first thing you see when you open up your complimentary copy of the finished product…
I used to work as a freelance journalist and had an editor once remove a rather crucial “not”, which made me much more cross than any self-inflicted typo could!
They say “writing is rewriting” but what they really mean is “writing is rewriting is trying to find the damn typos”.
Llongyfarchiadau / Congratulations, Suw. As a Welsh learner and enthusiastic observer and painter of the birds in my garden, I find this a useful little book. Its appearance is also excellent timing with the next RSPB Gwylio Adar yr Ardd (Big Garden Watch) coming up later this month (24-26 January). Taking part is very easy and offers the bi-lingual opportunity to read the survey’s simple guidelines and complete the tally form in Welsh and/or English. Good practice! https://www.rspb.org.uk/?sourcecode=BWMEMM0025&utm_source=EBGB_BGBW-2025-Reg-Trigger&utm_medium=email&utm_term=&utm_content=1&utm_campaign=bgbw25
Thank you, Jason! I’m so glad that you’re enjoying it!
I signed up to the RSPB Gwylio Adar yr Ardd (Big Garden Watch) myself, so looking forward to doing that. Though I have to pick my hour - our garden doesn’t get that many visitors, despite all the food I put out!! There’s always a robin goch, mind you, and he’ll fight anything up to the size of a starling!!
The book features 12 birds, with about 200 words of description, plus vocabulary for each one. The illustrations are all in colour, yes. And the book works very well on iPad, in Apple Books.
That said, ebooks aren’t really designed for this many images and tables, so you may wish to adjust your settings to “Original”, or any other setting which uses the original design, and to then experiment with font size and reading orientation, ie portrait rather than landscape, to find the best display options.
@suw this message came through in an email to Admin:
What a great little book for intermediate readers - only £1.99 and it’s a treasure. So impressed with it. Many thanks to author and SSIW for mentioning it.
