Jenny, I’d just go with your gut and keep learning conversational Welsh.
I did a classroom Welsh course not long ago and the tutor spent the best part of an hour telling us how to use a particular tense that didn’t match up with what I’d learned via SSiW. Then, almost as a post-script to this long explanation, he added “…but you’ll most often hear people in North Wales just saying…” and then went on to use exactly what I learned through SSiW. As a result, we had a class of people learning the ‘correct’ way to say something that the teacher acknowledged was rather formal and probably not used that much by Welsh speakers [facepalm].
Given the choice I’d rather learn to speak the Welsh that the Welsh use and not go around sounding like Officer Crabtree from ‘Allo Allo’ whenever I walk into a shop.
Jenny,
My teacher actively promotes SSiW. He had a conversation recently with a SSiWer, who not only had a wide range of vocabulary but also kept up with the teacher’s natural speed.
But - If your area is anything like mine - you won’t have a class to worry about soon. Many are closing through lack of support and in some cases - no funding.
I used to attend classes here in Birmingham, but they aren’t offered any more. I think the one single Welsh tutor that the centre had has finally retired.
It’s only the largest indigenous language of Sierra Leone. …Which, er, makes it a very small language I suppose. (An apparently hilarious version of it is spoken in the film Amistad)
Ah well, I’ll go back to waiting for it to be introduced in my local adult learning centre…
This is what I wondered too despite in actual speach I don’t see any links though. I didn’t do that much research though.
And @aran now I’m curious too what you expect from translators to actually do. I know you said you’d do no Slovene in long time and I also suggested not to but, I’m curious anyway. if this is not too big business secret of course.
I was just joking. I doubt there’s any secret link - though there is a strong Sierra Leone community in Cardiff I think, and a some partnership work between Cardiff University and Fourah Bay College (University of Sierra Leone). Both are small and very beautiful countries with great singers!
(Sorry, think we’ve gone off topic a bit. I’ll shut up now!)
Translate, map words, build sentences using what they’ve translated. Probably about two or three days of work to build the script for Level 1, and then we’d need to find a couple of voices
I’ve said elsewhere that we’re aiming to start work on 20 new courses before the end of the year () - we may well fall short, but we’re certainly not in a Slovene OR Japanese situation
Sorry @aran I understood this this way. If I missunderstood what said, let me be excused but that’s how it sounds to me.
It was in the thread “Self Introduction” started by @eirikthered though. Sorry, didn’t want to gosip though.
If you’re planning on doing Japanese then that answers the question I was about to ask about whether the same approach would work with tonal languages. I’d love to see how it does work though. I’m starting a hunt for a Mende translator!
I’ve no doubt at all the SSi method works with tonal languages, but I didn’t think Japanese was a tonal language like Mandarin, Thai, Vietnamese, etc. I’ve have been wrong many times before, though.
) - we may well fall short, but we’re certainly not in a Slovene OR Japanese situation