I have it as a PDF which I’m happy to share with anyone who might be interested. It is, naturally, written in an academic style because it’s a dissertation done as part of a degree, but I hope it’s easy to follow and clearly explained. What’s the best way to send it to you?
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If you went for Southern Welsh, there’s actually a good follow on: Cadw Swn (Google it) offers a parallel Welsh-English stories and audio is available. Both are available for slightly too much from the author’s site. In addition, the author has created two novelettes which are available on Kindle as text and Audible as audio. The Cadw Swn series is also in Southern Welsh, with only minor departures from what you learn at SSIW. For the record, while Cadw Swn is ostensibly for beginners, it didn’t really come together for me till I’d finished Level 1 of of SSIW.
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Sorry to chip in with a not-quite-relevant comment here, but I just wanted to say I’m really glad I read this because it made something clear to me that I hadn’t quite realised before: maybe the reason I love this method so much and it works so well for me is because I don’t think visually, at all! I have no visual memory and am completely incapable of visualising - it was actually fairly bizarre when I realised that just about everyone else really could “see” things purely in their own minds, and it wasn’t just a figure of speech!
I might not call it a learning style, exactly, but I’m sure that many other methods of learning would factor in a certain level of visual learning and visual memory that I just have no way of achieving. So no wonder I feel so attached to this course I can do lying on the floor of my lounge room with my eyes closed!
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That’s so interesting - you know you’re not the only one, right? In fact, Iestyn is like this, which has lead to some entertainingly baffling conversations between us… 
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Yep! I saw someone mention it offhand on a blog quite some years ago, and more recently I came across a great piece of writing by Blake Ross of Mozilla about his own experience, and there’s been a couple of articles reporting about it here and there as well. The scientists seem to be calling it aphantasia, which is quite nice, but I don’t really bother to use the name because no one would probably know what it means…
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@alex_1 I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I’m fascinated. Do you read books and, if so, how do you imagine? I mean, I am reading @elizabeth_jane’s excellent book and she makes me able to see, taste, smell and hear what it was like in the cramped hull of a sailing cargo vessel with hastily built crude wooden bunks and passengers crammed like sardines. If you read it, you will not be lucky enough to see it in your mind - and for that, you have my sympathy. Do you have another sense instead?
I don’t mind your asking at all
When I read, I’m not imagining anything. I see the words, I know their meaning, I understand what’s written and I follow the story. That’s it!
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I too find this fascinating - it is just that words don’t make pictures for you, right - I mean, you don’t have trouble remembering people’s faces? (I know there is a rare condition, called prosopagnosia, where the sufferer indeed can’t recognise faces). Actually when I was talking about my own reliance on visual memory, it was not to do with imagination in henddraig’s sense, just the fact that when listening to the audio I need to see the words sort of scrolling past in my mind’s eye, and get a bit thrown when I can’t.
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Yeah, no problem with recognition at all, just can’t produce images (or sound, etc) in my own head, whether it’s remembering something I’ve seen before or imagining something entirely new.
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Would you like to head up my fan club? Thanks for seeing such amazing things in my book.
What an interesting discussion. I always looked up the words after each lesson (Never in the lessson). We are not children. We are literate people. So, we can’t ever go back to pre-literacy. But that only served to clarify what I was hearing and I only ever looked them up once to satisfy my curiosity. But I’d been learning Welsh a while and therefore had a familiarity with the alphabet.
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FWIW, the images I conjure up in my head are not always by any means totally clear. Occasionally, they will be, but more often than not, they are pretty unclear. I suppose the pictures in my head when I dream are clear, but my memory of them is usually very unclear, and dissipates quickly after waking.
I’d guess that people vary an awful lot in this respect.
Oh, just noticed that bit. Funnily enough, I seem to be able to mentally reproduce sounds quite well. I can conjure up the voice (e.g. of a well known actor) in my head quite clearly. I sometimes do this for fun when I’m reading, so, e.g. I can “listen” to the book being read by Richard Burton, or Martin Jarvis, etc. And by now, I’m quite good at “conjuring up” Aran and Catrin’s voices. Spooky when you think about it.
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Spooky? You think?? Pretty amazing though - like your own audiobook system!
When I read, I hear nothing! There is no sense of sound in my head whilst looking at words. There is a massively strong sense of place though - I always, without conscious effort ‘set’ everything somewhere. Not only books, anything that I’m listening to (including SSIW), or those little conversations you have with yourself, even writing this message. They all have a passive background. Somewhere that I know well, although not consciously significant (although SSIW is always happening somewhere in Lampeter, which is clearly connected in my mind as a place of learning Welsh, even though I’ve learnt way more Welsh sitting in my dining room in Oxfordshire…). All silent though. I had no idea that anyone else might experience this differently! 
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Fascinating thread.
I find that doing the SSiW lessons with my eyes closed is the ONLY way I can do them. I’ve tried doing something mindless like shelling peas at the same time. Didn’t work. I have to block out every bit of visual distraction and give 100% of my concentration to the voices on the recording. I use Duolingo as well, and I find that doesn’t sink in nearly as quickly as SSiW does.
I’m not a totally non-visual learner - I do like diagrams, and if I’m trying to learn something that involves relationships between entities and it doesn’t come with diagrams, I’ll draw my own - but I’ve always learned better from words. I take in very little from photos, for instance - I gain more from reading the captions. I dislike films and TV shows that are heavy on the visual action and light on the dialogue. I’m forced to keep a running commentary in my head of what I’m seeing (“He’s opening the door… he’s walking over to a desk… he’s picking up something… it looks like a notebook…”), and frankly, it’s tiring. If I’m not observant enough to catch all the details, or if the action moves too fast, I miss things. So SSiW appeals to me because Aran and Iestyn have already done all the heavy lifting of putting everything into words. I don’t have to look at a photo, such as Duolingo gives me, and try and work out in English what on earth it’s a picture of before I can come up with the Welsh word for it.
But here’s a curiosity. When I’m reading for pleasure, I prefer the written word to the spoken. I detest audio books. I suspect it’s because (like most of us) I can read so much faster than anyone can speak, so I get impatient with audio books.
I suspect it’s not as rare as you think. I’ve heard estimates that at least 1% of the population has some degree of prosopagnosia. I have it; I can’t even recognise my own mother’s face. I mean, if I knock on her door, and an elderly woman opens it, I can be fairly confident it’s her, because who else would it be? But at, say, a family wedding or funeral, if Mum hasn’t told me beforehand what she’ll be wearing, I can’t pick her out of the crowd. I’ve often confused her with her sisters, or with my own sister. (My sister was quite cross about that!) To compensate for it, I’m better than average at recognising voices. There have been two recent instances where I’ve heard on TV (totally out of context) and correctly identified the voices of people I used to know 30 years ago and 35 years ago respectively.
When I’m reading Shakespeare, I always hear an actor’s voice in my head, often Derek Jacobi’s. I was very good at memorising Shakespearean blank verse when I was at school. The other kids would marvel at what they called my photographic memory, but it was never photographic. It was auditory. If I recited the poetry aloud over and over, or listened to a recording of someone else reciting it, I could then “hear” it in my head, like switching the Play button on a tape recorder.
So the tremendous amount of aural repetition in SSiW suits me perfectly. In contrast, I think Duolingo is more suited to very visual learners. It doesn’t have the degree of aural repetition that SSiW does, and I find its robotic voice forgettable. And no matter how good your auditory memory and how accurate your pronunciation, if you can’t remember how a word is spelled, you can’t progress in Duolingo. I find this frustrating.
I hear Cat’s voice in my head quite a lot, when I’m going about my normal daily activities. She offers commentary in Welsh about what I’m doing. At first I thought it might be gibberish, but I’ve been surprised when I translate the sentences into English and discover they’re meaningful sentences (although I don’t know if they’re grammatically perfect), and relevant to the situation! For instance, if I pick up an apple and go to the bench to slice it, Cat’s voice in my head might say, out of nowhere, “Un afal gyda fi. Dw i’n hoffi afalau. Bydda i’n bwyta’r afal.”
It’s very strange (in a nice way). And curious that it’s always Cat’s voice, never Iestyn’s.
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Aaaaaand I just realised that I forgot the “Mae” at the start of that.
I make that mistake a lot with sentences that have numbers in them: one cat, two dogs, three coffees, etc. I concentrate soooo hard on trying to remember what the gender of the noun is, whether the number itself changes, whether the number triggers any mutations in the noun… that I forget all about the verb at the start.
Oh, well. Another mistake down, another 9,483 mistakes to go.
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That sparks a thought, @aran I am sure all Welsh speakers know their numbers and would understand if I said, “tair” with male subjects or “tri” with female. but how dreadful a mistake is it? And is it not ‘dau ci’ rather than “dau cwn”? Google translate plurals the noun!
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My (probably imperfect) understanding is that it’s dau gi because of these two rules:
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When the number directly precedes the noun, the noun remains singular. If you want to use the plural noun, you must insert o (of) between number and noun, i.e. dau o gŵn “two of dogs”.
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Regardless of whether it’s the masculine or feminine form of the word for “two” - dau or dwy - it always softens the noun. So gi instead of ci.
If I’m wrong, please correct me. And interestingly, when I plugged “two dogs” into Google Translate to test my answer, it agreed with me: dau gi.
Although I then entered “two cats”, and Google Translate gave me dau gath when I swear it should have given me dwy gath - shouldn’t it? Because cath is feminine? If that’s right, it seems Google Translate is inconsistent at the very least.
I too would like to know the answer to your question about how dreadful a mistake it is to get these numbers wrong. The rules for numbers are difficult!
I think I’m getting a handle on them when I have to talk about objects - cats, dogs, apples, etc - but then when I go to tell the time, what with twenty and eleven and twelve and fifteen and what have you being different from what they were when I was doing simple counting, I just fall to pieces. I am pinning my hopes on proficient Welsh speakers being very tolerant of learners.
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Ouch! Of course you are right about dau gi not ci! It was the ‘how cringeworthy or hilarious is wrong sex number.’ question that really bothered me, so I totally forgot the SM for a male. I am bad at those anyway. For ages i thought my sex was clear from the ddraig, forgetting that draig becomes ddraig after hen anyway!
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Not at all - often won’t even be noticed…
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