"Video Stars" team presents

[Matilda]

I agree with everything @henddraig said. I watched the first three or so minutes of the video above, and found that the pictures at best added nothing to my understanding, and at worst were actually distracting. By about the two and a half minute mark, I was either closing my eyes so I could listen better, or my gaze was roaming around the room.

And while knowing the Welsh spelling is helpful for telling the consonants apart, I find it unnecessary and even potentially misleading when it comes to the vowels. Truly, I’d rather just listen to the vowels, so I’m not tempted to look at the spelling and pronounce them as though they’re English vowels. I have no trouble whatsoever hearing the vowels.

I realise that this will probably mean my literacy in Welsh falls behind that of other Welsh learners. I sometimes read Welsh phrases and sentences in this forum and think, what strange looking words, with all their [w]s and [y]s, what on earth are you saying? But inferior literacy, or at least more slowly acquired literacy, is a price I’m prepared to pay in order to develop a better Welsh accent.

The main thing I would find valuable in a video, as @henddraig mentioned, is a closeup of the speaker’s face as they form the words, so (for example) I could clearly see the difference between [dd] and [f], or between [pr] and [thr]. That would only need to be a very short video. Just saying each word in the vocabulary list twice or maybe three times would be sufficient. The entire vocabulary list for a single lesson would probably fit comfortably into a two-minute video. But it does need to be a close-up. If we can’t clearly see the speaker’s mouth, you may as well not bother.

Actually, make that two things… as @henddraig also said, in challenges that contain long sentences, it might be helpful to be able to look at the English sentence as a memory prompt. This would help compensate for what seems to be my below-average working memory. But that’s a fairly minor thing. I find hitting the Pause button and repeating the long sentence in English before attempting the Welsh seems to work well enough, most of the time.

Having said all that… different people learn in different ways. Some people might find a video method more appealing. I prefer to close my eyes while working through the lessons, but some people are visual learners, and they may find that looking at words and pictures helps hold their attention better.

And hey, if the purpose of the videos is mainly to spread the word, then go for it. Anything that helps drive more traffic to this site can only be a good thing!

[aran]

Hey, I might know someone who would probably love to do a series of videos for you if you ever want her to.

That sounds hugely intriguing! What sort of stuff?

[saethwr]

Why don’t I see if she’ll email you with some ideas!

[aran]

[irfonifans]

Although I tried very hard to use the Audio Lessons, there was always a problem, the subtle difference in pronunciation between North Western & North Eastern Welsh. The problem is living and learning in North East Wales, and doing traditional classes, some words just didn’t make sense, due to the difference in pronunciation! My tutors had no problem telling me the difference, so I suspect it is only a problem for learners in the early stages. The, very professional video version is a welcome way of dealing with that difference!!!

I do, however feel the best route is the audio course but perhaps with a video version being available as a support resource. I am sure it would also be a preferred learning method for many as most of us do not learn and remember words but use mental images to associated with the words to enable us to remember them. There was a learning system called “Linkword” based on that learning method. (The Welsh version was very good but annoying it would tell you both North & South translation for a word, but then in the unit quiz would only accept the southern version as an answer. Requiring you to repeat the unit.

Whilst doing teacher training the most emphasis was placed on building lessons that provided the same information in as many ways as possible - because no two students would learn the same thing from any one lesson, but if you repeated it in a different way hey would both get the overall picture. Welsh is no different - so the more learning methods used the better the results!

[tatjana]

the more learning methods used the better the results!

Yes, but one method just has to be the ground method and I still believe the way SSi started it should be the “ground method” - audio one. As I’ve said already numerous times, I had many objections at the beginning too, but wouldn’t we, for a change, try to adapt to the system until later lessons before saying “I just can’t go with only audio to learn anything at all?” Sometimes people - including me - are too quick in determining what we can and what we really can’t do but rather go with easy way saying “I can’t do this this way because I’m used to do it that way…” - as I said - including me being in that group for quite a time. I’m trying to take what I get now and adapt. If it really (but I mean really really) doesn’t go, then I’d say so. I’ve got that determination in trying things first before saying “I can’t do it because I don’t see well” concerning my eye (the only eye I have) so why I wouldn’t do that in learning languages also.

And once again as we both, @aran and I said, this set of videos is mainly aimed to present the course to the crowds and trying to attract them on here to try the method. If we succeed in this, then we’ve done huge work. (well, this is my and only my opinion of course which can easily be dismissed by others).

[mikeellwood]

Hi @tatjana - I just want to say (without going back up the thread to where you talked about it) that I am hugely impressed by the way you / you all got the audio and the visual to match so well. Technically, it’s a tour de force!

[tatjana]

Thank you.

And in the last post I’ve posted (to make things clear) I just wanted to say actually that our specialty is learning through (only) audio which, as so many researches and work was done by @aran, @Iestyn and the whole team behind, we just shouldn’t “abandon”. After so much moaning I (FINALLY) am in resonance with this method and now I just don’t want to jump out of that. (if you know what I mean).