You sound as though you haven’t quite made up your mind about Finnish literature… 
What’s the worst that can happen? You learn a huge amount of extra Welsh and ‘fail’ an exam?
Go for it. Plenty of good advice in here.
I’d be happy to throw in a monthly tuition session if that would help, and I expect I’d be able to find some other people who’d be willing to help coach you… 
Oh i’m going to sound awful now…
I love this idea. However, if the IB is important in getting to where you want to be and the requirements dictate you need x percent in this and y percent in that then if the assessment is based on the expected performance of a first language speaker who has already got a level 2 qualification then a level 3 standard is a big challenge.
Don’t get me wrong, i love your enthusiasm. However if this is going to cause you problems in attaining the IB overall, i just would consider the future implications before you commit.
As others have said, if you believe you can do it go for it. Just make sure you’ve researched it thoroughly first.
@Novem fach, @Pete2 is right of course. He is a teacher so knows exactly what you could lose if it goes wrong. It isn’t just one failed exam. But, when I was around your age, my school made me drop History, because the Head didn’t want us taking too many subjects (aiming for high overall results of course). I adore history and have since I was 6 and found an old school book of my dad’s. Later, I found that I could easily have passed the exam with what I knew and also that I could have taken it by entering privately. I always regretted that missing O Level and might have taken a totally different career path had I taken it and done well. So, don’t give up! Just think very, very hard. Test yourself. If you know in your heart you can do it and will regret ever after if you don’t - go for it girl!!! This old dragon will roar you on!!
I’m not necessarily right. To this day i regret not pursuing welsh in school, but at the time a judgement had to be made and like it or not Oxford wouldn’t accept Welsh as a foreign language.
I made a decision back then, albeit with the best of intentions. It was an informed choice. Maybe in hindsight the wrong one but nevertheless the correct one at the time.
That’s a toughie, isn’t it? I get very grumpy with British people when they talk about Welsh as a ‘foreign’ language (because of course it’s not). But if you’ve learned it as a second language of course universities should give it the same weighting as they would French or Latin or Mandarin, or whatever. Do you happen to know if this is still the case?
Thank you everyone! 
Yeah, good idea
Thank you, I’ll check that out. And thank you for the list!
I’d love that, thank you so much
They would be really helpful…
Yeah, I know… 
Fail the entire course and have to redo two years 
I’m not really worried about that, though. I think I’d be able to pass. Right now I’m just hoping I’ll be able to convince my student counsellor about this when I see her next week!
Oh, wow! Thank you so much! Diolch o galon i ti! Both would definitely help a ton.
No, don’t worry! I really appreciate your advice
I have already been checking the websites of all the universities I’m interested in, and it looks like even if I got a 2/7 from Welsh I would still have a decent chance of getting into all of them, so I think that as long as I’m able to write essays, I’ll be fine. Also, studying Italian wouldn’t be that much easier for me, so one of my grades is going to be a lot worse than the others anyway. (I also imagine that having studied Welsh would help me get into Welsh universities a bit, but I don’t know. It seems like a good thing to put in the application thingy)
I’ve stopped caring about getting the best possible grades or going to the best possible university, as long as I get enough to go somewhere I like, I’ll be happy
Okay, I have now decided to talk about this with my student counselor next Friday. I will do my best to convince her and ask about whether I can decide which language to schoose when school starts in August. Hopefully it’ll be possible!
Thanks again for all your help, advice and support! I really appreciate it
(edited to fix some typos )
If only we had the Finnish education system here in Wales - if your motivation to learn is typical then that is amazing. If the system has the flexibility that allows you to follow your interests and become a truly independent learner or researcher then that is amazing as well. These are lifelong attitudes and skills that many university graduates, let alone school age students might never realise.
There are undergraduates on the Welsh degree course here in Cardiff whose Welsh is only at a Bac sort of level when they arrive - I hear them in the corridors speaking English to each other (how annoying is that!?)
I don’t speak with any sort of authority, of course, but I imagine that if I were a university admissions tutor, I would consider someone applying who had the guts, imagination and application to teach themselves Welsh to that standard on top of a whole load of other languages to be an extremely strong position. Don’t undervalue the power of self-motivation; it counts for a huge amount.
I don’t know if my motivation to learn is typical, but most people I know do actually enjoy learning, so I’d say it’s pretty good
However, the school system I’m in at the moment is not Finnish. I’m not sure whether the Finnish school system would let me do this, but I know it is quite flexible. Last year (in a Finnish school) I was allowed to study math independently and to go at my own pace for about a year.
Good, because that stuff genuinely doesn’t matter any more - you can learn what you want to learn and achieve what you want to achieve with just internet access and a love of learning. Those two things are far more likely to lead you to a happy and fulfilled life than any particular grade or any particular university…
Very true!
How do I say this politely, but not sure I fully agree. I think for whatever reason those qualifications or bits of paper are more important now than ever before. You could be absolutely brilliant and a world expert, but if you are thinking of working for a large organisation, with a rigid HR department that preselects candidates, based on qualifications then you won’t get your foot in the door to a lot of jobs these days without a bit of paper that says so.
Probably @Novem would not like a big company like that, but even in research, qualifications matter to start with. Gone are the days of amateurs discovering great,things - oh, .OK, maybe computer geeks in sheds, but even games are now developed in quite formal settings now, I do think at school, qualifications matter, but Novem seems to be in a country where you can get them in excellently varied ways! She just needs to research in advance and be pretty certain that her chosen path has a reasonable chance of taking her where she wants to go! 
There’s nothing impolite about disagreeing - disagreeing is good and interesting…
My take on it is that the number of jobs which have absolutely strict exclusions based on qualifications is getting smaller all the time (massively impacted not least by the rise of automation) - and within that, the subset of jobs where you won’t be considered because you didn’t go to the ‘right’ university is shrinking as well - the main point I was making earlier being that it really doesn’t matter which university you go to…
You mean you want to take Welsh as HL or SL subject for the IB?
We don’t have Welsh HL or SL here in Finland, so I can’t take either. I could take it as a self-taught A language. Those can only be SL (in our school)
Well, it seems like you’ve made your choice really…
I guess the bottom line is: what do you want to do at Uni, which Uni you want to get into and (if you have any idea) what do you want to do “when you grow up” or at least what field do you want to get into?
Unfortunately the grades (and subjects) that you study now will be considered important, especially in the UK.
[Just to give you an idea, I am applying for a PGCE (to become a teacher that is…). In the UK you need to show to have studied certain subjects at GCSE level (an exam pupils sit aged 16). It doesn’t matter if you have A-levels or higher qualifications, the subjects you studied at Uni or if, like me, you get to it as a mature applicant. The grades and subjects taken aged 16 are more important…
This is just to say, be mindful of the choices you make.]
Well, not very innovative, but what works for me: first of all I try to read extensively inside the chosen topic - so, if it’s literature, then all the book reviews and magazines I can get. Scott Thornbury mentions an interesting statistics in his “How to teach vocabulary” book: “When reading, words have a good chance of being remembered if they have been met at least seven times over spaced intervals”. (p.24). I can’t recommend this book enough - you can add “yourself” after the word “teach” and use it not for students but for your own language learning, the techniques are almost the same: spaced repetition, use, affective depth.
Then, I use Quizlet.com, I think it’s a great website and there are a lot of word sets made by other learners.
Here are two with literary terms in Welsh and words for writing essays:
https://quizlet.com/83293936/brawddegau-iw-dysgu-cwestiwn-synoptig-flash-cards/
https://quizlet.com/114717318/literary-terms-in-welsh-flash-cards/
Mind-maps also work well, if you’re visual like me, but I’m too lazy to make them:(
At uni I’d like to study mathematics or computer science (or something like that). I don’t have one specific uni I want to get into, but I’d love to move to Wales if possible (I think my rankings at the moment go: Bangor, Aberystwyth, Cardiff…). I’ve been interested in teaching (math, chemistry, physics or languages) for a while. I’m teaching some of my classmates math at the moment.
I think I’m alright with the subject side of things. I’m going to be taking Math, Physics and Chemistry HL, so I do have all the relevant subjects This choice is only between Italian and Welsh. I imagine Welsh might be more relevant if I can go to Wales (since I am fluent in Italian and don’t really need to learn Italian literature for anything anyway)
My grades are also quite good, so I’m not that worried about them. Choosing Welsh would almost definitely lower my average, but I don’t mind. It’ll still be good enough
Thank you so much for the advice!
Thank you! I’ve been using memrise to learn some vocabulary. Using it alone doesn’t help, but I’ve noticed that if I manage to hear one of the words in a song/book or on tv/radio it actually sticks.
I’ll check out the links