Absolutely. I wouldn’t have got anywhere near as far as I have without this forum and the wonderful support I’ve received from everyone here!
Have you been using your Welsh in conversation yet?
1 Like
I am a long way from being conversational yet and I don’t know anybody to talk to in any case. Ottawa is a long way from Wales!
Have you considered Skype? I talk to quite a few people using it, as I’m also a long way from Cymru (Australia)! I jumped in reasonably early - after the introductory course, and while it was difficult, I feel as though it improved my Welsh dramatically.
It’s nerve-wracking, but so satisfying when you can have even a simple conversation! 
3 Likes
Just finished Lesson 4 with the results getting steadily worse. My success rate in getting the sentence out before Cat is down to about 10%. I don’t mean to say that the lessons aren’t working, far from it. I’m getting a ton of new knowledge, but I can’t see Lesson 5 being more successful than Lesson 4. I’m not completely lost. I understand the grammatical concepts being introduced, I have a good ear for the sound of words, and I understand when Cat and Iestyn are speaking. However, without practice (which is what repeating is) the vocabulary isn’t coming to the top of my mind quickly enough to say the sentence. Most of the time I’m not saying anything. I will do Lesson 5 sometime this weekend, but after that I think I will likely go back and start repeating Lessons until I can say most of the sentences in the time provided.
I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you, it’s completely normal for the vocab to take a little time to sink in. The great thing about this course is that the revision is built into the lessons, so if you push on it will eventually sink in. Before long, the sentences will come to you without even having to think about them!
4 Likes
It’s important for you to feel comfortable with the approach you take, so doing it like that would definitely be better than carrying on, hitting a wall of despair, and stopping!.. 
But I promise you (because I’ve watched it happen so many times) that even if you’re only hitting 1 in 10 right now, if you’re understanding the responses when they come, repeating lessons until you can say most of the phrases will slow you down unnecessarily.
You’re right that practice is repetition - but everything in the course gets revisited at specific intervals - so although you don’t have the sense of conscious control that list-learning gives you, you will get there if you keep pushing on.
How about revisiting 2 after you do 5, just to see what it feels like, but then push on to 10 before you revisit 3?..
1 Like
I guess part of the problem is that this isn’t my first shot at learning languages and this is a very different approach. I am completely fluent in French and I achieved that the traditional way through high school and university. Working in French for the past 28 years hasn’t hurt either. I can see though that SSiW is very well suited to its target audience, which seems to be adult learners, not students. I understand everything that Cat and Iestyn are saying, so I will push on as you suggest. Thanks for the support.
3 Likes
Forgive me for asking, but were you completely fluent the first time you went to France? Can you remember a time when you had to struggle for words and find another way to say what you wanted to say? If not, well, you are pretty rare!!
If you can cast your mind back to your early days, well, you are pretty early on in that process with Cymraeg!! And it is as if you had been popped down in Paris on day 1 of learning French and were picking up a little more each day!!
I know that each time I went to a rugby match in Paris, my French was better. Learning with SSiW is like that, but you don’t have to wait 2 years between experiences!!!
Immersion is definitely the best way to learn a language, and SSi is about as close as you can get online. I learned Italian through immersion (though it was in a classroom setting) - from the very first word the professor spoke to the class, everything was in Italian. By 4 or 5 weeks in, even all our book lessons and homework were purely in Italian, instructions and all. I learned more in that 10 week course than I did in my first 3 years of traditional French classes (before we went immersion in that too). I feel like I’m picking up Welsh just as fast with SSiW, even though it’s not total immersion, and definitely know enough after now after a few weeks to be able to carry on a basic conversation. Just wish I knew more vocab…
1 Like
I spent my third year of university in France so I was already quite fluent by the time I arrived. However, I can definitely remember having to struggle for words. When I was 14 or 15 some students from my school did an exchange with a school in Quebec and I was boarded with a family that spoke very little English. Afterwards, my opposite number came to live with my family for a week.
I can remember a difficult conversation about what we were going to have for lunch.
there’s a part of my brain that wants to learn the way it has learned things in the past, which is memorizing vocabulary and going through drills. However I can already see the benefits of SSiW. I find myself making up sentences on my own, and I am looking forward to the next lesson.
2 Likes
Flew through 4 Challenges in a row today (7-10). I think that’s enough for today and will probably revisit them all again tomorrow (several mistakes in Challenge 10). Luckily a lot of what was in those challenges is some repeat of the early Lessons from Course 1. Now I’m up to that double-time listening exercise, though. May hold off a bit on that as I’m still getting used to the one from Challenge 5…
1 Like
Isn’t Quebecois French a bit different? One time I was in Paris and met a lovely lad from Quebec. We spent some time together. People, notably waiters, tended to pick up on his French. I think they called it ‘Colonial’!!!
It was a bit like the waitress in Germany who commented on and corrected another friend of mine and, when told he’d learned while living in Austria, said how sorry she was, not for correcting him, but for him for having learned ‘bad’ German!!! I can’t imagine any waiter or waitress in London ‘correcting’ English from Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, South Africa, or, for that matter, any of the dialects of Britain or Ireland!!!
1 Like
Cherish those mistakes - they’re a sign that you’re going fast enough - I strongly recommend you pushing on another 5 or 10 sessions before thinking of doing any revisiting…
And if you can get through 4 in a day, you might find the Accelerated Welsh group on Facebook interesting: https://www.facebook.com/groups/441099812756153/
Yes, absolutely - it can take a fair bit of getting used to - but broadly speaking it’s a good idea to try and take the whole approach on board, rather than seeing if you can squeeze parts of it into a more familiar kind of learning…
So I did what you suggested and went straight on to Challenge 11 without repeating any previous challenges. I actually remembered a lot! Some things I got wrong the first time, but then corrected them so I got them right the next time the phrase came up in the Challenge. I never pause the lessons so I ran out of time on a few of the sentences, but my brain knew what was coming even though my mouth couldn’t make the words come out in time. The only sentence I had a huge problem with in this challenge was the very long last sentence of the lesson. I’m sure what I said made sense, it just turned out to bear almost no resemblance to what I was actually supposed to be saying.
I am having trouble remembering the difference between “wnes i ddim” and “do’n i ddim” and I missed “Bydde fe” almost every time (I think I was overlooking “would” in the English sentences), but I figure eventually I won’t mix those up anymore.
Anyway, on to Challenge 12…
2 Likes
Quebeccers speak the same language as the French, but the accent is very distinctive, and spoken Quebec French has words that don’t appear in France. That nasty, condescending attitude is something that Quebeccers experience sometimes in France.
1 Like
I have heard of it, though I, myself, can hear only the tiniest difference between the French spoken in Quebec and the French spoken in France. And I like the accent of the people from Quebec much, much more. I find it hard to believe that French people can have a condescending attitude towards them, considering that they kept the language alive in a predominantly English-speaking territory and created wonderful poetry and music in it. Sounds very ungrateful to me.
Vive le Quebec libre!!
Well, I wore a Quebec badge on my jacket for years after meeting Jean Marie and have always seen Quebec as in very like case to Cymru!! They are actually ahead as they have had, I think, 2 Indyrefs and Cymru hasn’t had one yet and would vote ‘No’ if it did, by a zillion miles!! (Sob). I have hopes for my present abode. A few more years of the Dave and Gideon show…
And no, I don’t understand the sniffy attitude of speakers of high Deutch or Francaise-Parisienne!! Sorry, this is totally irrelevant to the forum and I’ll shut up now!!
1 Like
Before we both stop with this off-topic:) I really admire people from Quebec: they’re bilingual, they’re (mostly) not self-conscious about their accent at all, which is wonderful, and they’re really “more French than the French themselves”. And they have given to the world the great gift of Émile Nelligan’s poetry, which is one of the best things in French ever:) I wish all the language minorities were as stubborn and proud:) It’s a relevant issue here, in the Russian Federation and countries next to it.
My first exposure was when a lovely family with 2 small girls moved in near us. I volunteered to read the children a story and found that all their books, ALL, were in French!! Yet the children were speaking perfect English with only a trace of what, to my inexperienced ears, was a bit of an American accent!! I was hugely impressed and took great joy, for the short period we were neighbours, in reading to the children, because it did wonders for my French!! (I was 14!).
I have great admiration for any people who retain their language, whether in be Cymraeg, Latvian, Lithuanian, Kurdish, Georgian etc. etc.etc.!! 
2 Likes
Superb - that’s the system working exactly as intended, and completely normal/good - so it’s clearly going very well for you…
That sounds great, too - it doesn’t matter at all that you run out of time for some of them, as long as you pay attention to the models and mostly recognise the stuff that you hear… And don’t worry at all about the long ones - not many people can get all of those!
Likewise, don’t worry about wnes i ddim/do’n i ddim - it’ll work itself out in time as you keep on giving your brain all this good exposure…