Thank you, @henddraig!
I felt similarly – when I was slacking a bit and reading about your regular progress in your thread, I confess that that motivated me to listen to some more sessions! A bit of friendly rivalry in my head, perhaps 
No, not that I heard. Though I’ll never know what they thought behind my back 
You are very kind @Mererid
We are going to have a new edition of Intermediate Welsh - I’m working on it now…
Remember, folks, you can click on the ‘Share’ button at the bottom and get a link to send to people who aren’t on the forum - they’ll be able to read the thread without having to open an account on the forum - and from what we’ve seen so far, I rather think they’ll love seeing what you’ve said about them… 
[And yes, I’m taking my own medicine with that - I told Siwan, and she had a look, and emailed me to say that it had brightened up a grey Monday morning for her… It’s really worth sharing your gratitude…]
Well, like Margaret I feel a little teary after reading all the lovely comments. I am very grateful to have discovered SSIW. Aran you have much more than a language learning group you have brought together a family across the world who have welcomed, helped and encouraged each other. So, thank you Aran and Catrin for your vision and the sacrifices you made to get SSIW going. Special thanks to Iestyn and Cat who were the first people I encountered while doing the Cymraeg de lessons. I loved meeting them at Bootcamp. What a talented loving family. Thanks to all my Bootcamp friends who were so kind to me and so patient as I tried to interact for the first time ever in Welsh. Marc, thank you for looking after me on our cliff walk. You may not remember but I do. As I do not usually drink alcohol I was thrilled to discover that after a glass of cider everything seemed easier. Now I know why yr tavarn stars so much in the lessons.
My lovely friend Bronwen, thank you for welcoming me to your home and driving me around. It will always rank up there with my life’s best experiences. Thank you for all the Skype chats. You are my only connection with welsh right now. Thank you to the girls who got together for the Skype chats: Isata, Brigitte, Tatjana, Elke, Bronwen. Thank you to Carys who tracked me down in Brisbane and spent a lovely morning speaking Welsh. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do it but I did. Margaret, thank you for the fun time at the Eisteddfod last year. Thank you for insisting on speaking Welsh. When we were at Tintern Abbey you read the welsh language information and I wondered then if I would ever be able to do that. Well now I am reading (slowly) novels for learners and enjoying them. Your encouragement has been important to me.
I have to say thank you to Iestyn for putting up with my on/off attempts to get to Bootcamp this year. None of which is my fault!!!
Lastly, although I am not on the forum often, if look in and have learnt a lot from you all.
Diolch.
Diolch! Nothing changing really, work, work and more work, but mainly in real classes, not on Skype. Very sorry to hear you haven’t been well, I hope you will be feeling much better now… How is your Italian?
Diolch yn fawr iawn i Martyn Croydon, fy nhwtor ar Sgeip - mae Caroline a Myra hefyd. Bob wythnos ein grwp ni siarad ar Sgeip. Maen nhw wedi helpu fy hyder. Dw i’n byw yn Milton Keynes Mae’r dim ond ffordd i ymarfer siarad yn Ngymraeg.
Diolch yn fawr Brigitte, Ti wedi bod yn ffrind go iawn i fi a dan ni wedi mwynhau lot o brofiadau gwych o fyw yn y Gymraeg dros y blynyddoedd i gyd. Ti wedi bod fel chwaer Gymraeg a dan ni wedi byw ein breuddwyd ni o fod yn Gymry Gymraeg ! Dw i’n gwerthfawrogi pawb yn ein teulu SSIW ni, diolch i’r tîm a gymaint o ffrindiau gwir a ffyddlon i’r iaith ! Dach chi’n werth y byd i mi !
Thanks a lot Brigitte. you have been a great friend and we have enjoyed a lot of fantastic experiences o living through Welsh over the years. You have been like a Welsh sister living the dream of welsh speaking, I appreciate everyone in our SSIW family, thanks to the team and a lots of true and faithful friends of the language, You are of such worth to me.
Just to say - when your thank yous are coming later on in the process, and you’ve had the sheer delight of becoming a Welsh speaker, it’s absolutely natural to want to offer your thank yous in the language you learned…
If you do this, please do also provide an English translation - because it only takes a tiny number of Welsh-only posts before early stage learners feel that this isn’t the right thread for them until they too can do it in Welsh.
And we’re particularly keen to encourage the ‘thank you’ habit in all our learners, even if they’ve only listened to a single session…
I had a plan to make next post in here on Saturday, but there are so many posts mentioning me that it seams an eternity since my last post so here I am. I’d like to give some answers to some posts first. But since this software doesn’t let you mention more then 10 people (what is understandable) it’ll have to be two parter …
PART 1
Thank you @annaC for letting me make an atempt to cheer you up and encourage you one particular time you felt your learning is not going anywhere and life wasn’t too good to you. It was inspirational momment which gave something to me too. It was special feeling which I just had to express somehow, a wish to help in some way. Hope it worked. For all who missed that, here’s that moment of time …
@Mererid, I’m sorry to hear you’re not well at the moment and I do hope you’ll get better soon. I wondered many times where you might quietly vanish to and what happened and I’m glad you came back on here and if only to thank Bronween. And, yes, I know that thingy about peering into the forum and being aware a bit later that it’s not that particular year anymore but one or two next ones. - hehe. Just that such passion involves nights as far as concerns me.
@seren thank you for mentioning me although I didn’t really do much more for you then being kind and tried to be supportive which last I failed to be quite some times though.
@garethrking I hope this includes me to so thank you. At the moment I’m not too passionate about learning but I’m slowly going somewhere near to kind of success in my learning proces.
@netmouse it was all my pleasure to talk with you no matter in the group chat or after it already ended. But I doubt it was kind of fix of your Cymraeg really, speaking with me. I could hardly teach anyone anything or being a step to “fluency”. Well, but any exercise is good exercise so thank you to call in.
@ramblingjohn thank you for having me in this “international madness” of Skype group. You’re always so supportive and most of all you’re a great listener. And, you are good at languages, believe me, it’s just that you don’t know that yet (or you don’t want to know ). You helped me a lot.
@AnthonyCusack the thank you goes back to you. I so enjoyed your singing and, to be honest, the real thanks would be grabbing (buying of course) a CD of yours at some point in the future. Such a strong and brilliant voice just should not go to waste or should not be somewhere in the background. Oh, and for check out if you’ve named all here it is something … this is the ending part of 1:47 long Bootcamp video I’ve put together and is available (only) to July 2016 bootcampers but I dared to extract this out of it for all of you to enjoy.
And … there surely will be another Skype chat at some point and that time you’d hopefully be able to join us.
@philipnewton it’s hard to talk things with the person who you don’t really know and even harder if the language you speak in is 3rd language actually, but I always tried to talk something different from ordinary “lesson” stuff if even a bit of a nonsense. However I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to really talk something of your interest when we were in group chats together but sadly I just don’t watch Round a rund which seamed to interest you the most at that point. I’m not that kind of person who would know the world … our country is little one with quite different habits and happenings from the rest of the Europe … But you made huge improvement in your Welsh so I can perfectly understand you for that matter. The language is always the matter of talking to someone with enjoyment and not that much of a practice itself. Whatever, it wuld be a shame you’d quit on your Welsh now. Dal ati. Remember … I’m not living in Wales either, have no family connections anywhere near Wales and Welsh at all as well and for that matter It’d be less possible to ever meet someone speaking Welsh in my country (if Margaret doesn’t appear in Ljubljana ) and I’m still here learning.
@Pete2 thank you for incluing me in your “circle” and even more, thank you for comming back from little disappearance off the forum a while ago. The forum and the whole learning wouldn’t be the same without you. And if I managed to be helpful in any way at all, then I’m even happier.
@brigitte - my only regular Skype speaking partner - thanks goes to you. I woudl probably not talk so much Welsh if there wouldn’t be yuo, willing to speak with me every single week (with some exceptions which forced us not to at the time). I’m so glad we could meet at the bootcamp. Knowing you would be there made me much less frightened of comming there. I really enjoyed that awesome week and I enjoy our conversations very much. For all the rest here - we talk aproximately 1:30 or even 2 hours (except some words) totally in Welsh. every Saturday.
CONTINUING IN NEXT POST
PART 2
Some more “thank you” replies …
@margaretnock the pleasure was all mine to be able to welcome you in my little country. You did much more for me and I thank you for that.
And finally for this one (long) post - @lynne_freudigmann “the legend”! Yes I’ve named you so as your presence on the bootcamp was so inspiring to me. Thank you for joining us on Skype session(s) if it was even kind of early in the morning for you. I was happy to see/hear you after quite amount of time and I hope next year it will treat you better and Wales could welcome you again. All the best!
To all the rest - I’m sorry if I’m kind of “unreachable” on Skype. I’m on only when someone invites me to the chat othervise I’m offline and even if I happen to be on I usually am not the one who’d call anyone. I always have that feeling that I’d be more of disturbance then anything else. …
Oh, and @henddraig thank you for every single mention. You’re praising me too much though … I just want to help when and where I can and I believe everyone would do the same.
And now here I am with my first “thank you” part. I’ll go with the course of my learning journey and the mentions are not meant to be somewhat of “the biggest thank you” but rather to who I chronically met during the history of my learning Welsh and had significent influence on my learning path.
The first thank you goes to two (that time teenage) brothers William (nickname Grancko) and Robie (nickname Toaroni) who I met on the gaming/Doctor Who/Lego forum Knight-Nui where I acted as an administrator. “You will never be able to learn Welsh! It’s hard, harder then French!” they said and I can not be thankful enough for that sentence which has put me into the course of learning Welsh in the first place. If there wouldn’t be them I might never be confronted with rugby and that way with the desire of learning Welsh at all.
To be continued next week …
Big thanks to everyone’s friend in Aberystwyth - Geraint who runs Y Cwps (a Welsh speaking bar on the edge of the town centre). Not only for being a great barman but also having the patience to listen to my shocking word order every single time I go in the bar!
More thanks next week
Well, @tatjana, you beat me to it! You are on my list of people to thank (I’m trying to do one a week, as Aran suggested, but you’re right, it’s hard to wait! ) You were so kind to me when I had that period of discouragement, and I was so very touched (still am!) that you actually spent your precious free time making a video to cheer me up. You’ve been a cheering section for me and for so many others, and I applaud your kind and caring heart. Your special character shows even more because you thanked me for letting you make the video - it’s me that needs to thank you! _Ti’n seren - diolch yn fawr iawn! (_translation - Tatjana doesn’t need it, but so no one feels left out - You’re a star, thank you very much!) 
One more thing - thank you for all your technical help and expertise, for all the posts and the extremely detailed tutorials you’ve written which have been a help to me and so many others. 
Not sure what we’d do without you!
Hi Louis, I recently sent an email to the Aussie group and yours was returned to me as undeliverable. I have had a lot of trouble with my account which was hacked and I lost all my contacts. They are back up now but yours doesn’t seem to work. Sorry. Would you resend me your email address please. Diolch.
I’m going to do my diolchiadau on a Friday in the hope that will be easy to remember…
And today, it’s diolch yn fawr iawn from me to David Hedley Williams - who was the tutor who gave the very first Welsh class I ever experienced - for which I was, of course, late - and who was, when I arrived, talking only in Welsh - to my genuine fear and horror.
Because I was the last person to arrive, and the last seat was on the far side of the room, I had to squeeze round the back of the class, not sure if he was welcoming me, mocking me or just ignoring me.
The ‘only Welsh’ thing was a bit of a theme with him - which made that first week one of the most exhilarating and challenging experiences of my life.
[Some of you might have noted a certain kind of homage to David’s ‘only Welsh’ approach on, say, SSiW Bootcamps…;-)]
Diolch yn fawr iawn, David, am roi cychwyn i mi ar y daith… 
That really is so true.
Anyway i remember feeling i was struggling with simple phrases when we first met, survived the week happily (but felt i was lacking).
As it happens, this week i was in Criccieth, and got into a conversation with a man in the hotel reception (first language speaker) about why i am learning and how i use SSIW, and how many languages it now teaches, and how many people i am talking with on Skype , the countries they are in, the weather , where else i go in Wales etc…
When i left it suddenly dawned on me just how much Welsh i had used without thinking about it.
Diolch pawb eto, it seems i have improved.
Oh, and the man is going to look at SSI to help his children learn Spanish.
Cheers J.P.
A MASSIVE thank you to SSIW and evrybody who has helped me, but also, and most of all, to my Ffrindiath, Ro, who has become one of my best friends, not just someone I talk to once a week…
Da iawn, J.P.!
Very late to this party, with being here for over 5.5 years now the list of people to thank is ridiculous and half of them don’t hang around here any more. The main list of people who have helped me is quite obvious to those that have been here a while, namely:
*The fab 4 (@aran , @CatrinLliarJones @Iestyn and Cat), these wonderful people always get lumped in together as far as I’m concerned, they’ve all played a huge role in getting me this far. Thank you. Your unending kindness, generosity, support, encouragement, hospitality and love is what keeps me hanging around year after year.
There are many more and you know who you are. It’s impossible to thank everyone so I’m not going to try. 
*edited to add a name or two to the “originals” list.
I want to start the week with a diolch again. He’s been seren yr wythnos but wanted to add something:
Diolch for your reassurance about the growing challenges of learning a language. Iestyn advised me, whilst on bootcamp, that gaining proficiency in a language is not a straight line. As you learn more it opens new challenges. This throws up new perceived road blocks. This in turn can make you feel down. At those moments, when I’ve felt I’ve stuttered or gone backwards, @iestyn pops up in my head with this advice. That’s helped me plough on!
Felly, diolch o wealod fy nghalon Iestyn! Dwi methu aros am dy wled di yn Nhresaith!
So true, so true. It can be so frustrating. And yet every time i feel i’m going nowhere something positive happens. Understanding first language speakers, communicating in shops, reading,radio, television etc.
And great moments when you make things up on the fly and noone bats an eyelid. (well apart from @Richmountart who laughed at my “ga i tocyn loteri” whilst on mini bootcamp).