Thanks so much - really looking forwards to getting back into advanced material regularly soon 
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Thank you Aran for taking the time to explain all that - I had no idea there was so much going on behind the scenes, and no wonder that with that + pandemic + supporting your daughter, it has all felt overwhelming at times. As the parent of a neurodiverse child who is no longer in school, I know how much mental and emotional space is needed to support them and deal with all the stuff that comes with it, and I’m honestly in awe that the two of you are doing so much! But please do put your own wellbeing high on the list too. Excited to hear about Scottish and Irish Gaelic being in the pipeline. I just have one question - you talked about the new system of streaming but how will it work exactly?
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Hi, Aran - I thought I’d reply here as I can’t work out how to post anything on the thread linked to in the email (Croeso! Welcome to 1 sentence in Welsh - how is it going for you?), so hope this is OK!
I’m English and have lived in England almost my whole life, except for a one-year university placement when I worked in Cwmbrân in 1980/1. I went to evening classes in Welsh out of interest, loved the language, and even found an evening class that I could go to for a couple of years when I returned to Bristol a year later. I’m a tutor on a distance-learning course in cultural astronomy and astrology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, nominally based in Lampeter, but because it’s almost entirely online I rarely get to visit the campus. I was there last week to run a Summer School and for graduation, and got the chance to practice my very rusty Welsh a little bit.
My motivation for doing this course is that even when I lived in Wales and had some Welsh-speaking friends, I couldn’t never get out of the habit of thinking in English and painstakingly translating into Welsh in my head. It also meant I could speak Welsh better than I could understand it! I could construct sentences using vocabulary I knew, but that didn’t mean I knew all the words in the reply the person gave to me, and because I was translating in my head what they replied word by word, I got lost easily. “Croesi’r bont”, my friends called that magical skill of being able to think and speak in Welsh without translating into English in my head!
It’s hard to say at this point whether SSi will be useful for me based just on the first five sentences, because I was already familiar with the vocabulary used (except although I learned in South Wales, I had no idea Cymraeg was pronounced “Cum-rahg” there - I’d always been taught that it’s “Cum-r-eye-g”, but maybe that’s because Cymraeg Byw was the standard method in the 1980s, trying to teach a sort of “universal Welsh”).
Going to Lampeter and getting to try out my Welsh has made me very eager to improve it, and - who knows - maybe even achieve some level of fluency at some point, so I’m keen to sign up for the SSi course and give it my best shot!
Chris.
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That’s very lovely of you, Ruth, thank you so much 
Streaming - we’re calling it AutoMagic - will make the whole process much more straightforward. You log in, hit play, stop when you feel like it - it will always remember where you’d got to and what you need next. You’ll be able to choose difficulty levels - getting more time to answer and shorter sentences and more repetition depending on the setting - and then over time we’re going to add more and more ways for us to understand how the learner is doing, and help adapt the flow to suit their needs (that’s a big project, which is going to take a while - we’ll probably do some fun gamification stuff first).
I’m really hoping it’s going to make a dramatic difference to how many people achieve success with the course 
That sounds like a terrific attitude, Chris! Good luck, welcome to the forum, and do let us know how it all goes
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