I will:) I have already taught some Welsh to my Russian relatives and my English cariad, so they roughly know the pronunciation!
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vs
beth i ddweud
Could you be so kind to tell me the difference between these two?
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I’ll certainly try 
In formal and written Welsh, it is customary to add a substitute object to the verb in beth type questions. In the spoken language, you don’t always hear that pronounced - sometimes only the resulting soft mutation, sometimes nothing, but as you asked about writing as well, I thought I’d suggest it…
So, for example:
spoken: ‘beth wyt ti’n wneud’ what are you doing - ‘gwneud’ is mutated because of the substitute object ‘ei’ which stands in for ‘beth’ although you might also hear ‘beth wyt ti’n gwneud’
more formal: ‘beth wyt ti’n ei wneud’
In your example, the substitute object ‘ei’, when combined with “i”, is written as “i’w”
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Yes!
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My question is about the importance of the rolled “R” in correct pronunciation. For me this is likely physically impossible to do like a native speaker. My singing teacher tried to get me to do that sound as a vocal exercise and it never worked. Do all Welsh speakers naturally make the rolled R like Bryn Terfel?
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Thank you so much! This is exactly what I was wondering. I really appreciate the time you took to answer this for me, again thank you so much 
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I’m not sure for native Welsh speakers but for English speaking Welsh many of them can’t always say rolling R. Here, we, non Englih speakers, especially us Slavic, have a bit of advantage as our R is sometimes even too “rolled” … If people can understand you then “paid becso” (don’t worry). (at least those are my thoughts on the matter because if you’d learn Slovene (my native language) I’d think the same it having so many rolling R’s too) Enjoy learning and do as good as you possibly can and you’re on a good course. 
A lot of people have this problem. I seem to recall that someone knew a first language Welsh speaker that couldn’t do it either.
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I don’t know what causes it, but some people, e.g. Roy Jenkins, MP, one of founders of SDP, (frequently referred to as ‘Woy’, poor man!), cannot say ‘r’ at all, but end up saying ‘w’ instead! A child with this impediment raised in Cymraeg must have real trouble, but I bet people understand them just fine. Everyone understood ‘Woy’s’ English!!! Many great orators have speach impediments, Nye Bevan had a stammer or was it a stutter? I tend to stutter… it’s due to trying to talk faster than one’s tongue can cope!!
Funnily enough, I have a very mild (to the point of basically undetectable) version of the same speech impediment in English, but not in Welsh. It’s actually incredibly common, and generally comes from children learning to pronounce ‘r’ with the part of the mouth one uses for ‘w’ rather than the part of the mouth one uses for ‘l’. That’s probably a large part of why so many people have trouble rolling their r’s; if you pronounce ‘r’ with the part of the mouth used for ‘w’, it’s basically impossible because your tongue’s in the wrong place.
In answer to the actual question though, it makes basically no difference; everybody will know what you’re saying. There are proportionally very few languages where it makes a difference; the only two I know of are Spanish and Italian, where they have the rolled ‘r’ and the unrolled ‘r’ as separate consonant sounds - and even then you’ll usually be understood.
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Okay, another question!(Southern, L1, C4, doing some revision)
How would you say/write “I think that I need to improve”
After listening to the tutors I’ve got “dw i’n meddwl bo’??? eiaisu i fi wella.”
It’s some version of bod (sounds like boy?) we haven’t gone over and I’m confused 
ALSO, same lesson, same issue with bod
“I think that I must go now” …“dw i’n meddwl bo??? fi rhaid i fi fynd nawr”
and
“I think that I’d better go now”…“dw i’n meddwl bo??? wella i fi fynd nawr”
Different question, about bo’ fi vs bo’ fi’n in the following sentence:
"I’d like to say that I’ve just started"…“hoffen i ddweud bo’ fi (fi’n?) newydd dechrau”
Which is correct? Thanks so much for your time!
Don’t worry too much about the ‘bo’ vs ‘bod’ - it’s simply that the ‘d’ often gets lost in speech.
As for your second question, ‘bo fi newydd’ is correct, as there’s no yn in the ‘dwi newydd’ sentence pattern, if I remember correctly.
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I don’t know for sure, but I’ve been using “bo’ fi” because you’d say “Dw i newydd…” not “Dw i’n newydd…”, meaning there’s no “yn”.
And as I was typing this I saw that @Karla wrote the same. 
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I had exactly the same problem as you. I agree with Karla and I also think @Iestyn needs to either re-record some of that lesson being very careful to speak clearly, and then post a note that he’s done so, or record a short ‘add-on’ to make the whole thing clear!!
to @aran I have a feeling you clarified this for me? Or was it Iestyn? I’ve forgotten! (My brain is definitely going!!)
p.s. I found it! I sent a PM to Iestyn which included your problem and he sent back that “bo ti’n” is what he was saying!!
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No, it’s by no means particularly uncommon to hear people who can’t say R - one alternative people take (including family members of mine) is to say it back towards the throat, like a French guttural R…
It’s a very common problem here in Russia/Belarus with children (because as you know we have this very hard-sounding pretty R), but parents normally take them to the logopedics specialists, and most of them fix it. I can look up for some techniques how to pronounce the sound, maybe they could help Welsh learners.
(I had a problem with it too, when I was very small, one of my most vivid memories is, on arriving home, running across the airport field to my grandmother, shouting "Granny, I’ve learned how to say “RRRRRRRRRRR!” scaring all the people around. I was very proud to have learned it at last:)
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Hi @wrenmoyer - it’s not really a “version of bod” that you haven’t learnt, it’s just a colloquial dislike of complication.
“Bo fi” should, grammatically, be “fy mod i”, but you’ll hear bo fi just as often if not more so. Bo ti, bo fe, bo hi etc are the same.
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Oh!! Exactly the feeling I remember when I yelled “Dadadadada” in my pram!!!
I noted in one Challenge the explanation of using ‘e’ or ‘hi’ for it, and it not mattering which… all fine. But in the actual example, I would have said ‘hi’ because there was a vowel making it hard to say ‘e’…whatever. Or I’d have said ‘fe’, which wasn’t mentioned. I nearly sent a query about ‘fe’, but thought maybe it was gogledd. Seeing it in your mailing, can I say ‘fe’ for he or it when it makes the sentence easier to say??