Exactly…and god forbid you ever use the English pronunciation of a welsh word!
Perhaps some of these people would be Better suited to learning Klingon - it hasn’t been diluted in purity by slovenliness and contact with other languages yet.
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I’m beginning to think Gareth King’s village was raised to the ground by an army of language pedants done up like extras from a Conan film when he was a child… 
The only time I have come across people trying to correct my Welsh is a handful of other learners in classes. No Welsh speaker- either a native speaker or someone who has learned it - has ever behaved like that yo me. And I’ve been through a fair few learning procedures to mean that is a ridiculously tiny percentage, and spoken to a fair few people.
Mind you, with one exception- the only person who speaks Welsh fluently and corrects me without me asking is one of my closest friends. But then, he only started doing that when my Welsh got better, and knew/knows me well enough to do it only when he knows I would be interested, it wouldn’t put me off and wouldn’t break up the conversation.
So basically all Welsh speakers and learners I have spoken Welsh with have been extraordinarily patient and helpful.
Just my experience!
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I think there was an era between the fifties to the seventies where many native speakers were made to feel they were speaking a patois. You do hear many native welsh speakers commenting on someone’s perfect Welsh etc even now.
Oh, I really think complements on someone’s good Welsh are par for the course in a situation such as Welsh is in. I am not going to condemn members of my family or friends of mine for calling someone’s Welsh good. And yes, fewer Anglicisations are often part of that.
Nothing wrong with having opinions on what is good Welsh, or good English, or good Hungarian.
Nothing wrong in expressing opinions on that.
Something wrong with stuffing them down other people’s throat unasked- but I’ve come across precious little if that.
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Perfect Welsh to me is a childhood memory of being sent by my grandmother to get bread from the bakery, which was in the basement of a terraced house. As I walked in with my brother everyone was joking and laughing in Welsh and asking us in English what we wanted, because they’d been told who we were. The Welsh was perfect, because it was simply natural and normal. No amount of grammatical correctness could match that.
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Absolutely. Natural and normal Welsh is great. And there are people who think that some Welsh words are more pleasing, for many reasons, than others. There are some Welsh speaking people who would use some Welsh words in preference to - not just instead of - in preference to other words, some constructions in preference to others. I can understand that. I feel the same thing in English. I think some people speak English better than other people. I don’t make a song and dance about it. But like many people, I think it. The point is I don’t try to impose my opinions on others.
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Peter… Glad you wrote my report on my day in Llanrwst! Maybe I should add a bit more on this point. As I said there, I was very nervous about starting a conversation. And I’ve never experienced this in any other language that I’ve tried: French, Hebrew, Italian, German… Maybe, as suggested elsewhere in this thread, there is something psychological about learning an “obscure” language like Welsh. I think however that it’s just a matter of getting used to it. This week was my first time ever trying Welsh in flesh face-to-face. I actually found the run-up to it rather unpleasant: I was that nervous. But I knew that I had to break the barrier, which went down in a few moments to be honest. I made every mistake in the book and my 85-year-old Welsh-as-a-first-language listener just smiled and encouraged me, then gave me some tips and loads of encouragement.
So yes, the barrier for me has been broken. Next time I try this, my Welsh will or will not have improved, but I’ll just move straight in there without the nervousness.
On another note, here in Israel we have loads of immigrants learning Hebrew. If you want to discover a native fool, listen out for those who make fun of your Hebrew (or whatever). In 35 years I’ve yet to meet a decent person who makes fun of someone else’s language skills, and I’ve met quite a few (always) young morons who laugh at you - it’s their problem.
My best Hebrew clanger was when I wanted to ask a female co-worker if I was disturbing her. It came out as “Am I impregnating you?” The two phrases are not too dissimilar for a learner. We all had a good laugh and my workplace did not collapse!
To anyone still reading this…whatever language you’re starting out with, just get out and go!
Hwyl fawr i chi pawb!
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Can I be pedantic here for a moment, @owainlurch? It’s ‘razed’ to the ground. 
Yes…in my experience native speakers of Welsh are far too polite (and balanced!) to correct someone else’s Welsh, unless of course asked to in advance. Before it was razed to the ground, my village was mostly Welsh-speaking (lovely Welsh! natural and lively, and with just the authentic amount of English loanwords happily accommodated!), and certainly with some that I knew well I did say to them ‘if I say something that really sounds wrong to you, please tell me’ - and eventually (after some reluctance) they accepted this and did. And a great help it was. But the aggressive correcting I have witnessed in my time has invariably come from (as I said earlier) zealous learners, usually with a political agenda.
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Yes indeed - mainly by the growing Second-Language industry, I’m afraid. Contempt for native speakers in some cases. Same thing happened, and I think still happens, with Breton over in Brittany - an aggressive and powerful body of (mainly) middle-class learners appropriating the language and dismissing the natural native speech as ‘incorrect’ or ‘inferior’. There’s a book on this somewhere, but I can’t remember the author or the title, unfortunately.
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Exactly so - me too!
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Are you the Gareth King of the Modern Welsh Dictionary?!
Yes.
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Did you like it?
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Baruch i dont think its because its obscure. For me it isnt. I’ve lived in wsles virtually all my life. I am immensely proud of my nation.
Maybe thats the problem.
I am also reminded of an argument aran had with someone who criticised aran’s lack of teaching qualifications and used his own as justification for his attacks on SSIW. I wont name names but the comment about if youre serious about learning came from someone who spouts their qualifications as justification.
Maybe its them eho have the problem. Im just happy learning. It makes me feel more welsh. And looking forward to my two meets next week.
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“the scapegoating of the literary language on Welsh and Breton”, or some such, mentions that, if that’s what you were thinking of. Its mentioned elsewhere on this forum.
Here we are - I hope! But difficult doing this on a phone without the fingers of a pixie!
Thankfully though, at least where I am -or rather at least the people I talk to! - don’t take the standard of learned Welsh or second language speakers as being the benchmark when they talk about someone speaking good Welsh. Done exclusively, I can see that would be a quite odd and even injurious thing!
I know of that one, but that’s not the one…that takes the opposite view basically, that the artificial literary version should be imposed on the benighted peasants.
That’s definitely not the impression I took away from it, by a very long way- and is certainly not a précis of it I recognise at all. second one mentioned in the thread you might find interesting though. Hope it might be of some help to you, anyway. "And yes, that other thing does look interesting- “speakers display a tendency to assess their own Breton as inferior, uneducated, and imperfect; paradoxically, these same speakers also evaluate literary or academic varieties and the neo-Breton of the school-learned speakers of the language as suspect.”
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