It is NOT a different language in N and S Wales, it is only a different dialect where accents and some words are different just as you find between different regions in other countries throughout the world.
The important thing is to learn the language, the vocabulary, and language patterns in whatever course you chose to follow. Then, if you feel very committed to Welsh, make an effort to pick up the differences found in many parts of Wales such that when you hear them you are familiar with their meaningā¦
I am wondering which Welsh accents non-UK people find easier to understand. I think that people with one accent find certain other accents hard to understand. I used to work in a call centre, I can easily understand any UK accent, with the exception of some strong Black Country / Birmingham accents, but I worked with people who had no trouble the Birmingham area but struggled with Glasgow. Hence I am curious as to what the patterns are, if any!
It depends if people are talking to me or between themselves. When someoneās talking to me they normally make an effort and so I have no problems at all. Of the UK accents I can understand Yorkshire, because I like it, itās my favourite accent, together with Iestynās beautiful Southern Welsh accent. I understand Northern Irish (and Irish accents in general) a bit less, but I tried to teach myself to listen to it. But Scouse and most Scottish accents are just impossible. They make me cry, I donāt understand a single thing.
As for the Welsh ones, I have trouble understanding people from the North on TV or radio. One of the reasons why I decided to do the Northern course too.
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Well I lived the first 18 years of my life in North Wales and not that far from Liverpool - but I cannot understand a scouser. I once got lost in Liverpool in my car at night and asked directions several times - I didnāt understand a single word - yet I probably would have been able to make some sense of a Frenchman, Spaniard or German!!!
And then I had the most wonderful evening recently chatting to a Glaswegian. We enjoyed each otherās company immensely. I hardly understood a word he said and my bet is he didnāt understand a lot of what I said.
We parted happy - what a nice man he was,
Justin
[quote=āJustinandEirwen, post:24, topic:3739ā]
first 18 years of my life in North Wales and not that far from Liverpool - but I cannot understand a scouser
[/quote
The closeness may be part of the issue. Birmingham is close to Mid Wales, so it perhaps should be easier to understand, but for me it isnāt. It seems to me that the closer to Merseyside you get in North East Wales the more Scouse like the accent becomes, maybe subtle differences actually throw people a lot, an accent has a certain direction, so if nearby areas accents head in opposite directions, they become harder to understandā¦
Or itās maybe āsounds you likeā I love a sexy Scottish accent, which may explain why I can understand it easily, whereas I am not particularly fond of the Brummie accent. Perhaps you need to hear sounds you like for your brain to click into the accent.
These whole linguistic questions are fascinating.
Thereās a Glasgow accentā¦and then thereās Kelvinsideā¦
This is interesting, and gives us a pointer to the true issue / options / solution.
In order to understand an accent, it has to have enough features that are familiar to you. As a second language speaker that has only been exposed to a small number of speakers (eg jusr Aran / Catrin or Cat / me for most of your learning), then you are going to struggle with nearly all other accents and dialects. Thereās no way to avoid that, and there is no shame or disappointment to be had because of it. OK, I know it is disappointing, but you shouldn;t allow it to be!
But hereās the thing. You can learn to understand any other accent if you have the tools and a reason to do it.
At the moment, the tools arenāt very good for you. The listening practices are your friends here, because if you can learn to understand Aran / Catrin and Cat / me you already have two very different pairs of accent / dialect / delivery voices in your armoury. The bonus is that once you can understand your own target pairing, you should be able to get used to the other pair fairly quickly, because we are saying the same thing with slightly different words.
The other thing is your reason. The more specific reason you have, the more likely you are to get it sorted quickly. If you want to understand everyone on Radio Cymru, youāll struggle to work out where to start. On the other hand, if you want to understand a particular presenter, then you can make a few recordings of the programme, and listen to them over and over again. There are podcasts for learners on the BBC, including a short vocab link and an introduction to the subject - itās worth having a look at who appears often on the pigion site, and starting with one of them. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrvyj/episodes/downloads
To start with, youāll struggle with understanding most of it. When you come across passages that you understand most of (theyāll be short at first), ask here. As you get more used to the voice of the particular presenter, youāll understand more āin real timeā. and notice the way that presenters will spookily use phrases that youāve just learned in the lessons - how do they do that? Don;t rush it, though. It will happen in itās own time. You can only go through the motions, and allow the process to take its course. If you let it that can be frustrating, but if you think of it as a relaxing, no-responsibility-and-no-work kind of activity, then youāll enjoy it more.
I suspect the reason that seren understands Yorkshire (because she likes it) is that liking the accent makes your ears perk up whenever you hear it, and put in that tiny bit more interest into getting used to it. That in turn has knock-on effects to your understanding. Thatās much easier to do with a single accent than with a whole language of mixed and unpredictable accents!
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Thank you so very much, @Iestyn!Listening is my biggest problem, and that is partly due to my bad phonemic hearing (I am a visual person and was always behind the rest of the group in phonetics, when I did English at university). But it can also be because of the fact that Iām really trying to understand everyone, and get frustrated when I donāt. It made me feel a bit of a failure recently, because, as I say to students, speaking is impossible without listening: Now I can see a direction in which to work:)
One thing I find when Iām listening is that I understand fine when I let everything just wash over me, but the minute I start thinking ādo I understand this?ā I force myself to translate every word and panic when I canāt do it fast enough, and because of that I understand far less. Letting it all just happen is a little scary, because my understanding is slightly hazy, and itās like I canāt really control how my brain is understanding what Iām hearing, but I find it far easier to carry a conversation that way. 
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People get paid very good money to do that at the senedd and in courts etcā¦ They, of course, are not learners! I think I mentioned elsewhere that I had trouble at a Funeral/Memorial Service when my Auntie wanted me to tell her what was being said!! In those days I could understand it, but not while whispering translations to her of what had just been said!! I know why Translators get good money!! It takes a lot of skill and a briliant memory!
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You are right, but that extra step to getting real enjoyment from listening is a a very tricky one.
It is possible to know and understand almost everything word that is being said and still not have a clue what the story is about. I go for the wash it all over me and it helps to get the gist a lot of the time, but those few words here and there can completely destroy the listening experience. This example is reading and not listening, but I think it outlines a few of the difficulties. I picked an article on Cymru-fyw today ā āDegawd
ar drydarā
There were 517 words in the article. I wrote down the words I didnāt know and there were 27 words. Three of those words were repeated at least twice. So there were 33 instances of words that I didnāt know. There were only two unknown words that I could guess. Basically I was stuck on 31 occurrences. Of those I had looked up eleven of the words before at least once and they simply hadnāt stuck at all. Only about 18 words and three expressions were completely unfamiliar. That was enough to ruin the experience and made it too much of a challenge.
Basically that was too many words to look up for it to be enjoyable, yet I still knew almost 95% of the words. That missing five percent makes all the difference. Getting that extra vocabulary is a hard slog ā these are not the most frequent words, but they are really important ones to know when listening to the radio, if the listening going to be really enjoyable.
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One simple trick you can use when listening to Radio Cymru Programmes on the computer, is to use the information on the programme page on the RC website, and donāt be afraid to use google translate (or the very handy ImTr browser extension that Jeanne Prendergast told me about) to get the gist. Having at least a rough idea of what the programme is going to be about helps put into context what you are about to hear. Some programmes have fuller information than others, usually partly in English.
e.g. looking at todayā shedule at 12.30: āGari Wyn
21/03/2016
Gari Wyn aāi olwg unigryw ar fyd busnes, mentergarwch a Chymreictod.ā
Well ābusnesā is a clue, but if we use GT: āGari Wyn and his unique insight into the world of business, entrepreneurship and Welshnessā
Clicking on the programme linkā¦ok, in that case, there is no further information, but some weeks, there is more detail about which businesses he is looking at. (Iām not personally all that interested in business, but Garyās warmth and enthusiasm manages to make it sound interesting, even if Iām only catching some of the actual meaning).
Anyway, you get the idea.
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In your reading example, Iād definitely recommend something like ImTranslator, when reading on the web. You can use it in pop up modeā¦highlight the unknown word or phrase and click on the icon.
Admittedly you canāt do this when listening, but this is an example of how reading can boost your vocabulary, which later comes in useful when listening (or speaking, hopefully).
(there is also a version for Firefox I believe).
Iāve only used it on a computer. Not sure about mobile devices.
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Thanks Mike,
Will give it a go. I am wondering if taking away the effort of looking up the words will make them harder to remember. I have stopped using the vocab button on Cymru Fyw, because I keep having problems with the same words and feel that I need to make more effort to look them up. It is a tricky balance - too many unknown words and itās no fun, but if I make things too easy, then I might never learn them.
I used to be a bookworm as a child in English (Nancy Drew mysteriesā legends like Beowolf and all of the easy reading Enid Blytons etc, by the age of about eight or none), but stopped reading books for fun in English when I was about 10 years old and my Grandmother kept buying me more and more challenging books with the floweriest range and style of words in them. I couldnāt enjoy diving into a dictionary every other paragraph. I am finding a sort of deja-vu with some Welsh books right now - it is just that few too many words per page to have to look up - two or three per page would be enjoyable - ten to twelve is too much.
Mike,
Good idea to just look at the schedules - will try that. I go up and down a few mountains on the way to work and my radio switches between Radio Cymru and Radio Wales, depending on which seems to have the strongest signal. I often hear the same news headlines in English first and then in Welsh and that can make a big difference to ease of listening - e.e. headlines and stories referring to something like āiselderā, which will then reuse that word in its various forms several times, will be hard to engage with, but hearing the headline and article in English first and it suddenly becomes a breeze.
I donāt try to translate every single word - it was the first thing they taught us about listening while I was doing the ELT training. I relax and try to understand the gist, but I simply donāt get it. Itās like listening to a song in a language that you havenāt learned yet but that is from the same language family with the languages that you know. It sounds familiar, but I canāt understand it.
I understand perfectly you, Flynn, Tatjana, John - learners, but not natives and not the radio/TV. Partly, I put it down to the fact that I donāt know enough lexis, so once the topic is new, I am lost.
It would be amazingly helpful if there existed podcasts for learners, with a transcript and some questions that check understanding. Brute force (just listening for years on end, till you start understanding something) can work all right, but the same goals can be reached in less time just be using a text (for reading) or a podcast (for listening) with questions for comprehension. First, you know what the material will be about, so you feel more confident, then you concentrate more because you know you have to listen/read to find out specific information, and then, answering the questions, you can train either listening or writing skills, whatever is relevant. So, just from a 5 minute podcast you can get listening practice, new vocabulary, new grammar, speaking or writing practice (by answering the question, retelling the text/audio, making practice sentences with new words and structures). But this you can do if you have suitable material. Most podcasts I have found are aimed at natives/advanced learners, are hard and are not supplied with comprehension checking exercises.
Iāve been working with Mynediad/Sylfaen exam past papers to develop comprehension. Thereās a listening part of the exam, and all the audio and questions are available freely here, under āRelated documentsā: http://www.wjec.co.uk/qualifications/welsh-for-adults/. Unfortunately, there seem to be no keys to the test (or I havenāt found them) but there are transcripts. I use tests as exercises. There are not too many of them, but itās something, and itās helped me a bit already.
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Thanks for this. Iām developing the ability to listen and allow it to wash over me and stop my mind trying too hard to understand, I find that Iām slowly getting a more and more accurate gist. so, itās good to know that this skill will remain useful for a long time, even when i reach the point I feel i should be understanding most of what is said.
Simultaneous translators are amazing. The fact that they are speaking their translation of the previous sentence whilst listening to the next sentence is amazing.
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When i was learning to fly i was told the best way to learn is to teach, i still dream of making little wildlife videos, but of course feel my Welsh is not good enough yet.
I find it interesting in post above that some people find some words just donāt stick,(i have that problem) and yet i find some words i remember even if only read but didnāt hear them, @mikeellwood is aware of one i came across and discussed with him this week (it would appear at the moment i can remember it from that one contact).
For a really crazy idea, i have been thinking maybe (next winter) i could re-write the Eddie the eagle story (which wonāt be Eddie the eagle), different name, different story, it needed and ending that was interesting and i think that has passed through my mind, but continues to be modified in a relaxed way.
Now if the idea ever fruits, maybe @tatjana could do illustrations for the story with her paint box.
Then maybe it would be good enough (with voice over) to appear on SC4.
Yes we can dream, but there is always āMaybeā.
Keep doing what you are doing folks, the shared journey is fun and interesting.
Cheers J.P.
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I had forgotten all about that! Thanks for the reminder.
I think I know what you mean about making the effort. Itās a bit like āif it isnāt hurting, it isnāt workingā.
I used to believe that, but nowadays (increasing age, perhaps) I tend to think itās ok to use anything which helps us along, and speeds us along. But yes, perhaps itās a question of striking the balance.
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