We’ve talked about this a bit in different places on the forum - now I just want to bring it together in one place as extra information for people who are about to get our emails 
The first iteration of listening in the new app (so this is all on saysomethingin.app, which will have native apps coming soon, NOT on what we now think of as the ‘old’ app which the website still points at)…
Oops, distracted myself there!
So, the first iteration of the new approach to listening is what we’re calling Pod1. I experienced an early version of it when I was test driving our Croatian course, and I’m pretty excited about it.
As you all know, SSi focuses very much on forced production - prompt, you speak, you hear, and then we try to mix up the words and structures in lots of different ways.
This makes it very bad at teaching things like ‘Good morning!’ and ‘How are you?’ that you just can’t use in lots of different ways - so we just haven’t taught those things! In fact, we’ve shrugged our shoulders about them, and tended to say ‘Oh, you’ll figure that out when you start getting into conversations’ - which is true, but not hugely supportive of us.
What we didn’t realise - and this is now the core thinking behind all our new listening work - is that not everything has to be taught via forced production.
If you’re practising speaking enough (in the ‘traditional’ SSi way) then you can acquire the early stage interactive stuff by hearing it - mapped to English at first, and then later on without the English - as long as you hear it often enough.
So Pod1 - and this is now live in both our northern and southern Welsh courses on saysomethingin.app - now weaves in through the spoken production.
Every once in a while - about once every 30 minutes, I think, on the current setting - you’ll hear a ‘now just listen’ tag, and then you’ll hear something like ‘Bore da, Siân - good morning, Siân - bore da, Siân - bore da, Siân’ - and then it will go back to ‘now carry on speaking in the gaps again’.
The next time, you’ll get two phrases, then three, and so on - so the further you go through the course, the more interactive language you’re getting as a listening exercise.
And the individual phrases go through a process of change as well - the first five times you hear ‘bore da, Siân’ you’ll hear it twice at normal speed after the English - the next five times, you’ll hear it once at normal speed and once at double speed - and this pattern continues, very gradually, until you just hear it once at double speed, without any English. By that point, you find it very, very easy to understand, because you’ve heard it so many times.
I was a bit uncertain if this would work, at first - but then I was just amazed by how well it worked for me with Croatian.
I came back from Croatia with a set of significant improvements in terms of what we cover in Pod1, and I think it is now a really strong way to get through to very confident early social interaction.
Also, you don’t need to be patient and wait for it to keep coming back slowly in the main flow of the speaking practice - you can click on the mixdesk type image down towards the bottom right of the new app, and select listening mode - in listening mode, you can choose to listen to Pod1 with the English as well (drilling) or with only the Welsh (immersion) - and when you understand it well enough to stay in only Welsh, you can also start accelerating the speed of playback.
It also turns out to be a brilliant way to recap after you’ve not done any Welsh (or other language) for a while - instead of jumping straight back in with the speaking, you can just run through however far you’d got with Pod1 a couple of times, and it all wakes up again really quickly.
Next step is going to be Pod2 - longer, themed conversations, about an hour’s worth each, which are going to be our attempt at building a bridge from B2 to C1. These are still a work in progress, but I’m confident we’ll release our first Pod2 for Welsh early in the new year
And, of course, we’ve got a massive content addition project under way at the moment - I’ve done most of my recording, Catrin is hammering away at hers, and so are our southern voices (Dan and Eleri) - first draft release before Christmas