Okay, I gotta know: does anyone else have trouble mentally registering dweud (or ddweud) as “tell” instead of “say”? Yeah, I know it’s dweud wrth, but it’s just not taking root in my brain that way, especially when rhywbeth or some other words come in the middle. Same thing happens when siarad is used as “talk” instead of “speak.” I know these two words the first way I learned them, and they don’t seem to want to expand to include secondary meanings in spite of a lot of practice. Given the English, I just stop cold every time, unable to think of the word yn y Gymraeg.
Is it just me doing my irritating trick of over-analyzing, or what? Does it click into place eventually, or will I be stumbling over this forever? Hate to say it, but it feels like an Everest-height wall to me.
Yep, been there. I over-analyse stuff as well. So I eventually told myself that I knew it was correct ‘cos someone I trusted was telling me, so I forced myself to find a way I could accept it. I did that by finding an alternative to “tell” that included “say” that meant the same thing, because I was happy to accept that dweud meant say. So I accepted that “say to” had the same meaning as “tell” and it all fell into place.
Then it stopped moidering my head!
I had a similar problem getting my head round that but also came to the conclusion that “say to” does the same job, with the advantage that it also works as “say something to” just like “dweud rhywbeth wrth”.
The parallel is from Mathematics:- using a Lemma is a common starting-point when problem-solving. A Lemma is used as a stepping stone, something that has already been proved as reliable in order to get to a bigger or subsequent result.
It reminds me of the very first challenge in SSIW:- learning 5 words or small phrases gives you the capability of combining them in lots of different ways so that you can suddenly say 15 or 20 things.
Genius, really, imho.
I’m starting to think it might be better not to push too hard to separate them in my mind beyond learning the structures, now that I am seeing learners further down the road trying to blend their meanings back together for different uses!
