@m-kittelmann Sending a message to
admin@saysomething.com should sort things out.
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Posting should also, but does not …
What is really off-putting about the “challenges” is the constant self-praising tone of the teacher. Do you really need to advertise your own product by bashing Welsh classes - and in this ridiculous way? Current Welsh classes for adults are so interactive, that there is no way at all even the weakest participant has less of a clue about Welsh after a year than a learner after challenge number 5.That’s completely off. You would need to sleep through your classes in order for that to happen. On the contrary, an average evening class student after a year can also read and write a bit, not to mention background. Overall, it is more a matter of taste which type of course you do. Bashing of all those devoted and capable Welsh adult education teachers hardly helps the cause of the Welsh language. So why do it all the time in the SSiW audio??
The people who run SSiW - the ones who can sort this kind of problem - are not on this forum 24/7. This forum is largely made up of people who have done the course, people who are doing the course, and some outsiders who have experience of learning Welsh who come in to encourage and support others. The admin team will not necessarily see a post unless someone tags them in it - hence Margaret’s suggestion that contacting them direct through the email address is the best option.
As for your next post, I can’t comment because I can’t find the “bashing Welsh lessons” bit you refer to - could you tell me which challenge(s) and which version (North or South) you’ve found them in and at what point (timecode) they occur?
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I would love to see which particular ‘messages’ you are taking about. To me it sounds like you are just bringing in your own thoughts/prejudices on this. I have never once thought that the positive messages were denegrating other types of classes and I only took them as encouragement. Without the messages, I would probably not have completed all the levels and challenges and be speaking welsh daily.
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Bore da all.
I was wondering how I express ‘get’ in terms of:
- “She is getting angry”. Possible “mae hi’n mynd a grac”?
- “Do you get what I am saying?” - I expect there is no literal translation so would be “dach chi’n deall be…”?
- “come here and get some water”
I suspect there is a lot to unpack there! I have Gareth’s green grammar book so if there is a page in there that I could review that would be great; I have not managed to find it yet.
Diolch
English does tend to use “got” or “get” a lot. I think the answer is to rephrase into clearer and more precise English and then work out what that would be in Welsh. I remember as a child at junior school we had to write an essay with the title “Getting rid of Got”. The teacher must have been fed up of us writing: “I got out of bed and got dressed. When I got downstairs I got myself some cornflakes for breakfast and then got ready for school…”
Your first two suggestions look good to me. With regard to the third, it would depend on what the water is for. Is it to drink or to wash the car?
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I haven’t got Gareth’s green book (but I have other colours!), so I can’t point you directly at a page, but have a look at what it might say about cael and mynd.
Both of these can mean ‘get’ but in slightly different senses.
Cael can mean ‘get’ in the sense of ‘receive’, and mynd can mean ‘get’ in the sense of ‘become’.
So in your examples, the first one would be mynd (which you nailed!), and the second two would be cael (wyt ti’n/dach chi’n cael be’ dwi’n deud? Tyrd/Dere/Dewch yma a chael dŵr) - although your guess at the second avoiding the ‘get’ is perfectly fine!
In the third one, it wouldn’t matter if the water was to drink or to wash the car with - either way the water is being received from somewhere!
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Yes that’s a good idea, thank you. It’s kind of like I did in the second one where the english version of ‘got/get’ should probably be ‘understand’ if i wasnt being lazy (in english haha).
Diolch Siaron, as always I appreciate your helpful, speeds responses. I will take a look for those words in Gareth’s book 
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We have a huge amount of respect for all Welsh teachers, everywhere, and we never say anything against them - in fact, I’ve often commented on how classroom language teaching is one of the toughest gigs around.
But classrooms are NOT an optimal environment for language acquisition - and this isn’t all that widely talked about or understood - so a lot of our learners feel that they ‘ought’ to be in a classroom, and online self-directed learning is a less valuable experience.
So we try to give them the confidence to understand that getting to grips with this tough but effective approach is actually very worthwhile, and in many (possibly most) cases, can be dramatically faster than a classroom approach.
We also often recommend that people attend classes if they can, because the social element of learning is hugely valuable, and our concern is always for our learners to have the best possible experience and get the best possible results.
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Hi @m-kittelmann - this is not a bug; we cancelled you at your own request. This happened on the 27th as a result of the second email you sent to admin@saysomethingin.com demanding to be unsubscribed. After the first one (19th July), Deborah cancelled your subscription, and explained by return email that your access would remain until the end of the billing period. After the second email came through (27th) with no further context beyond additional exclamation marks, we concluded that immediate termination must be what you were seeking. If this was not the case, would you like me to reinstate your access for the period of 7 days that were remaining on your first month’s subscription?
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Would Norwegian bokmål and nynorsk be another example? I know bokmål is considered the “literary” form, but I don’t know if a bokmål word used in everyday speech would be dismissed.
[Context - One person said that Welsh was the only language they knew of in which words deemed “literary” would be dismissed. Another (Ken?) responded that German also had literary forms, but people preferred to use an English word, conjugated as if it were German. This was quite awhile ago - I didn’t realize that my response wouldn’t be threaded with those posts.]
I’m sure for many learners, including myself, learning in classroom just isn’t an option because there are no Welsh classes where we live. I spend as much time as I can in Wales and have always wanted to learn Welsh so I’m happy that I’ve had the opportunity to learn with SSiW - it was the only option for me. I was doing a lot of driving when I started and it helped me make the most of all that time in my car too!
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As far as I understand it, nobody actually speaks bokmål or nynorsk as such; they’re only written standards, and people actually speak a patchwork of mutually-intelligible dialects each of which resembles one or the other of the written standards to a greater or lesser extent. While bokmål does indeed mean “book language”, that doesn’t mean it’s the same thing as a literary vs. colloquial distinction; there are some spoken dialects which resemble bokmål a lot more closely than they do nynorsk (such as, I think, Oslo!). So I’d imagine that using a distinctively bokmål-flavoured word in an otherwise nynorsk-resembling dialect would be more akin to using a distinctively North Walian word in a southern dialect of Welsh - people wouldn’t dismiss it as being fancy, they’d just assume that’s how your particular dialect works, or perhaps assume you have influence from or have spent time in a region that uses that word. (Well, that’s my understanding anyway; corrections from people actually familiar with the linguistic situation in Norway are welcomed!)
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Thank you! That makes sense. I had assumed bokmål was literary, in the way that Shakespearean English is literary. (As you can see, I don’t actually speak Norwegian!)
Bore da! My niece wants to give an intro at a wedding she is singing at - does this look right? Diolch am helpu!
“Hello, huge congratulations to ‘A’ and ‘B’, I hope you’ve had a fantastic wedding day. Here’s to a brilliant evening with A, B, you, everybody” - - then they’ll launch into the Blues Brothers ‘Everybody needs somebody to love’
Helo, llongyfarchiadau mawr i ‘A’ a ‘B’, gobeithio eich bod chi’n wedi cael dydd priodas anhygoel. Dymunwn i noson wych gydag ‘A’, ‘B’, chi, bawb…
just a couple of tweaks -
Helo, llongyfarchiadau enfawr i ‘A’ a ‘B’, gobeithio eich bod chi wedi cael dydd priodas bendigedig. Dyma i noson wych gydag* A, B, chi, pawb…
*if the first name begins with a vowel, then it’s gydag, but if it doesn’t, it should be gyda.
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Diolch yn fawr iawn!
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Are there any books/resources that help with talking to kids? I mean kiddyfying words as we do in english: dog=doggy, ta=thank you etc. I guess hanging out with other parents who are first language and passing the language on is best…