When I passed my Uwch exam, back in 2015?, my Cymraes friend told me I should go off and get a degree in Welsh. That’s both expensive and time consuming and I do still need to work, despite any seeming evidence to the contrary. I’ve done some of the grammar bashing courses for Adult learners and sometimes they’re fun and sometimes not. I go to a Siawns am Sgwrs once a fortnight and to SSIW Caerfyrddin twice a month. I consider my spoken skills to be adequate, but not perfect but spend little time worrying about them.
I live between Caerfyrddin and Abertawe.
So what next?
There is a Certificate in Practical Welsh (Advanced) offered by UWTSD (University of Wales Trinity St David’s) which is £1800 for 3 modules, two of which are on line, with a bit of Skype time, and the third of which can be on line or residential in Lampeter. This is part time over a year. I’m investigating to check that it’s at a post Uwch level.
Is there a better use of my time and money? While I said I would write about my time abroad last year I didn’t, so I know I need the discipline of something a bit more formal.
Maybe this is going to come across as a bit impertinent, but maybe you need to stop being a learner and engineer yourself into a situation where you can use your Welsh much more in your job and wider life.
I do use it, spoken, quite frequently. What I don’t do, as I suspect many of us don’t, is write it. I don’t consider myself a learner, in the spoken setting. But I want to write more, and better!
You should be able to enter into correspondence with a tutor from that course to establish if it’s likely to be what you’re looking for. You’d have to be fairly convinced to spend that kind of money. On the other hand, if you’re looking for someone to set you writing tasks and then talk about them in detail, you could pay for quite a few lessons with a private tutor for that.
And/or, as Rob said, get yourself into a situation when you have to do something out of your comfort zone like chairing a meeting or writing a report or something which will force you to make an extra effort to check stuff out for yourself, in a real life situation. (I just did for next year at work - eek!)
I just read @netmouse s comment and £1800 could probably buy a lot of 1-2-1 tutor time and if you got a tutor half as knowledgeable as @garethrking you might only need some pointers and guidance and a few hours here and there to reach that extra level you’re aspiring to.
That’s an amazingly good suggestion @Toffidil, @netmouse, and I wish I’d thought of it myself! I shall ask around. In fact, I have someone in mind already.
I’ve heard a few people enjoying the “Gloywi Iaith” courses that are aimed at natural speakers who haven’t had much experience with their Welsh in a formal setting, ie working through Welsh and writing. I think that might suit you more than a “Welsh learner” based course, because you are an everyday Welsh speaker, so you don’t need to improve your conversational Welsh (or at least, the improvement that you need is happening already through gaining experience).
Sounds good. Ive just got into the site but could only access some of the stuff. Having said that, I’m using mobile internet , or trying to, in a layby in Llangybi, Ceredigion. Ill try again when I get back to the smoke.
