I have recently joined the Advanced section, having completed the 6 month course. I opted to follow the South Welsh course all along, as I am from the valleys and now live in mid Wales. All along I have enjoyed the course but now, in the Advanced course, all the interviews are in the North accent and dialect which I find a bit off-putting. Is there a southern Welsh alternative series of interviews? At 84 years, I can’t go all through the course again using the northern Welsh option! Many thanks
Beryl Thomas
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Beca lives in Llanrug, so it’s not easy for her to get a good range of southern/ish accents, although I believe that she has already managed some - in due course, it would be nice for us to get one of each every week, but that’s going to have to wait until we can afford to take on extra staff. But whenever Beca gets the chance to grab people with southern/ish accents, she’ll be doing so… 
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Hello Beryl,
I did the Southern course and well…it seems that we’re all getting used to a bit of Northern accent after listening to so many interviews and anyway there’s transcriptions and translations to help.
There are also interviewees from the South, from time to time. One I can remember for sure is Nan Humphreys (number 19). Maybe you can start with that.
Actually I don’t remember who else was from the South, but now that you make me think about it, it would be nice to add it next to the name in the list, maybe @aran and @beca-brown?
p.s. and well done, and congratulations for finishing the course by the way!
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Thank you both - I will look for the southern ones.
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Yes a very good point. I look forward to hearing more interviews from fluent speakers in the south
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Just my personal take on this:
I fully accept that more Southern stuff will be great and the Northern dialect can be slightly difficult, but I’d say only if you are from S Wales or perhaps S. England. Strangely, not so much, if you are from a different part of the UK or I would imagine a different country. Having said that, I live in SW Wales, and love the Northern stuff.
Probably, Level 3 SSiW or perhaps Bootcamp or a fair bit of Slack or clwb siarad type meetings would lessen the shock of going straight into the Advanced Content. Also, as with any course, the more of the Advanced Content Sgwrsau that you have already studied, the better that you are prepared for the next ones.
Finally - I now have the bug, so am listening to any 1st language podcasts that I can find. Some with partial welsh transcripts, most without. Some of these by necessity, tend to have fairly toned-down dialect so as to reach a wide audience, although they can include some specialised vocabulary. My point is that with these 1st language podcasts, I’m amazed at how much I can understand.
So, thank you, Beca and SSiW for another hurdle that has gone by the wayside.
Edited for clarification:
Great that Beca’s podcasts have dialect in them. It helps in understanding the non-SSiW podcasts.
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Hello Beryl - I completely take your point on this, and I do have some north-based south Walians lined up - it’s been a matter of arranging times to suit. This week’s happens to be a south Walian, and there was Nan Humphreys and Angharad Griffiths, off the top of my head. Hope this helps.
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Hi Beryl
I would not worry and just listen. I too have finished the South course (and forgotten or maybe mislaid some) and started with complete mind blank with Northern dialects. I’ve run through the first few lessons from the Northern course at about 1.4 speed and listened each week to these conversations. Often I feel I understand very little and just end up reading both Welsh and English together because I just can’t be bothered to use a dictionary! However, tonight I caught five minutes of Rownd a Rownd and understood everything being said. I actually think I get more from the because they are Northern a lot of the time! Don’t despair.
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