This isn’t what you asked, Kay, but I strongly recommend doing something else at the same time as the lessons if your technology will allow it. I simply can’t focus on one thing like this at a time - it would also do my head in. I found that doing something that doesn’t need the language centres of the brain (like washing the dishes, walking the dog, ironing) gave me just enough distraction to stop me losing the plot but not so much that I couldn’t produce the words needed.
Of course, this might not work for you (you might even have tried it already!) but I just thought it was worth sharing, just in case…
That sounds like a valuable idea Aran. Though I always personally seem to have a problem deciphering words in songs. After working as a guitarist in a four piece for a number of years I couldn’t ever remember the words to songs. It was always just the sounds that predominated. I was listening to some hymns that were on the radio a few days ago and out of three I didn’t pick out a single word. They were in English (my native language)??? I even have problems picking out some of the words in ‘coffi du’. So far I’ve managed ‘Dw i ar y coffi yn y bore’ (I think). As for the rest… . A program on TV last night (Andrew Marr: My brain and me) showed how a woman after having a stroke had real difficulty articulating but could sing songs without even a hint of hesitation. So maybe your idea could be fruitful for many learners. Maybe even me?!
It has lyrics in the description in plain text, and lyrics on-screen (with translation into English).
I’m not sure whether those are official, though, or what some fan thought he heard.
Note that the spelling there is rather colloquial northern Welsh (e.g. bora for bore, representing this typical northern E to A in a final syllable, or dwisho for dw i isio or yr ydwyf eisiau or however you’d spell it).
Thanks very much for the link Philip. Most helpful. I also found a series on YouTube entitled ‘Pethe’. It has a number of personalities e.g. Bedwyr Williams, ‘yn y gadair’. Each session lasts about three or four minutes and features each person answering questions posted on a laptop/tablet. They might be useful short listening exercises for members not able usefully to cope with longer sessions. It might be great if one of the members able to identify accents could list the personalities together with whether their accents tend towards North, South etc. I know there are about eight in the series. There may be more.
I don’t think that point of view is that much out of step, these days. but then i’m a person who studies the memory bit, and it seems obvious that languages just use that…
None of the L2 acquisition folk I know are very keen on the ‘memory only’ approach - and, to be fair, there are interesting questions about grammatical dependencies that are tough for ‘memory only’ to explain - there seems to be some interesting stuff being done in the construction grammar field which I’m trying to find more time to read up on, but a non-memory explanation of grammar still seems to be pretty central to most L2 acquisition work (I’ve even been told by earnest post-docs that what we’re doing can’t work because it’s based on ideas that were discredited in the 70s…;-)).
A lot of things were discredited in the 70s but have since been found to work. There was a huge movement in education that wanted to criticise lots of things.
I’ve managed to get to canolradd/uwch standard in 9 months using mostly SSIW. I’d love to be a guinea pig to debunk the critics!
I suspect some more complex hierarchical learning structures would cope fine with grammar (and afterall we understand just fine when grammar isn’t completely correct). Its a while since I read anything on this, though.
I’m from an animal learning background originally, and the whole error driven, spaced repetition approach sits very well with those theories.
I’ve got a hunch it may just be a matter of chunking (so rather than needing a mechanism for keeping in mind a structure that (for example) later on requires a subjunctive, we can just be plugging words/and/or/longer-chunks into each other). But I haven’t found any current work on those lines…
Oh, how fascinating - I’ve done a little bit of general reading in that direction - rather loved discovering how neatly spaced repetition in particular fits with work on sea snails, for example - I’d be very interested in any good overviews of error in animal learning, if anything in particular comes to mind as a good starting point…
As an additional note that may be useful to some, I downloaded Es File Explorer Pro (there is a free version but the ad free pro version is less than £3) so that I could move the SSIW lessons to the sd card on my phone. This I did only to discover when I exited a lesson part way through that a shortcut to the lesson had been placed on the notifications drop down ready and waiting at the point where I’d left off. Brilliant!
PS
I’ve just read that some disgruntled long term Es users are complaining of the bloatware in the free version of the app so maybe only the pro version is advisable for anyone thinking of loading it.
When I’d reached the point that I had downloaded a lot of lessons onto my Android phone, the SSiW app was taking up 2.5gb of internal storage and I couldn’t find a way of moving it to my SD card. In the end I resorted to uninstalling and reinstalling it, and just downloading the final lessons of the Courses and vocab units and Levels 1 and 2. Just waiting for more Level 3 now!
It seems that Android forgot to include a file manager and so file explorer fills the gap. It seems that it can fulfil other functions apart from moving files. I did have to fiddle around for a while to figure out how to move files but once figured it’s really ready. The great thing is once you’ve sorted how it works you can move bulk files. For instance I copied the whole of level 2 to my sd card in one go (from my internal download folder).
I downloaded the lessons to the internal download folder then moved to a file I created in ES Explorer (labelled Ssiw Level 2). The lessons sit there on the sd card where they can be played directly via the explorer. It’s really easy and efficient once you’ve figured out the system. Each lesson sits in its own shortcut circle when you open the folder. Just tap and you’re away. Large pause buttons and even a repeat button sit at the bottom. I should perhaps add that I use the SwiftKey keyboard which is free to install and can be adjusted to a larger size if preferred. I have both English and welsh on the keyboard and you don’t have to swap between. It recognises of you type an English or Welsh word. You can have I think up to five languages on it. The English and Welsh use the same keyboard but IF say Russian is loaded its accessed by just a swipe of the spacebar. You can also type by just moving your finger from one letter to another without lifting your finger from the keyboard (as I’ve done to type this. It puts the ’ into I’ve automatically too. You just slide from I to v to e and it comes up with I’ve. Magic.
Ah, I understand. I thought you’d figured out a way to move the lessons the SSiW Android app downloads over to an SD card, but still have them playable inside the app.
