Welsh course mynediad

Hi, I have just started learning welsh. I went to my first class yesterday. I am just wondering if anyone has any tips for learning the alphabet as I am already confused. We are doing welsh south. Our course title in welsh is:
Cwrs Mynediad - Fersiwn y de.
We were told to go to y.bont.org and ssiw.co but none of those sites have worked for me and I was wondering if anyone could help as these are the two sites that the tutor has told us to use. How can we use a site that can’t be found or doesn’t work.

Hi Heather, and welcome to the forum! I think maybe there was a hiccup with the website address for the second option - ssiw.co - but you’ve found your way to saysomethingin.com which is where SaySomethinginWelsh lives, so you’re in the right place!

As for learning the alphabet - we would usually recommend not to worry with reading and writing until you’ve got at least Course 1 or Level 1 under your belt - although of course you’ll be doing reading and writing in class, naturally.

If you click on Challenges up at the top there, and then Level 1, you’ll find the 25 free half-hour lessons we offer…:slight_smile:

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Aran has already welcomed you to the second of those links, but I’ll add a welcome too. And for the first link, which also has a hiccup, try this: http://www.ybont.org/

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Heather, welcome to the forum!

If you just want to get used to the sounds of the Welsh alphabet, you’ll find several You Tube videos you can listen to and repeat.

You’re so lucky to have a tutor who has recommended SSiW right at the beginning of your learning. I went through the two year Mynediad course, before it dawned at me that it was going to take me 20 years to be able to speak the language if I continued doing only two hours a week in a class. But if you get cracking on SSiW as well, you’ll be a confident speaker in no time. Pob lwc! (Good luck!)

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Couldnt agree more. At the end of level 2 i reckon youre more than ready for canolradd and maybe depending on how much practice you get and your vocab even higher. I know of at least one speaker who after less than a year is on sylfaen 2 or higher so hopefully you will be allowed to progress more quickly.

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Hi Heather I’ve used the same book (pretty much finished…), are you using the CD?

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Im struggling with the alphabet

I can’t afford the CD yet.

Sorry if this is a stupidly obvious thing to ask, but have you tried mentioning this to the teacher?
If you have, what was the reaction or advice?

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We only had 1 lesson so far. Our homework was to learn alphabet. Next lesson is tuesday. We have 1 lesson a week

Have you tried our first lesson? To be honest, I think that will probably be much more valuable for you than trying to learn the alphabet by heart (and with the alphabet, all you really need to know is we have a few letters that English doesn’t - Ll, Ch, Rh, Ff, Ng, Ph - and don’t have some that English does - X, Z)… :slight_smile:

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Helo and Croeso @HeatherSearle
Oh, that should be Helo a chroeso, I suspect, but all of us will tell you not to fret about details and grammar! I really think it is a bit odd to give you homework without giving you a copy to learn from. Perhaps @aran should have mentioned that ‘f’ sounds like English ‘v’ and ‘ff’ like English ‘f’, which is why girls called Ffion spell it that way!! Also ‘y’ is mostly like ‘u’ in English and is ‘ee’ in one syllable words or when the last syllable. It is much easier if it is written down and easier still if someone says it!!
Lwc dda. I think you’ll do fine with SSiW and everyone on this forum is really kind and helpful!

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Helo Heather,
Tric a chlic is good if you want to learn the alphabet first. It is what the wee ones use to learn the letters at school
Jenny

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Thank you or Diolch

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Thank you or diolch

What Aran said, but here is a link to the old forum giving the Welsh alphabet being spoken.

http://old.saysomethingin.com/welsh/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=11107&p=123336&hilit=alphabet#p123336

Just something to be familiar with at the moment, I would have thought. If I remember rightly, at the start of our courses it was simply that the sounds of the letters were explained and given at the front of the book, and people doing the course just looked them up less and less as time went on rather than learning the alphabet off by heart to begin with.

The same with alphabetical order, looking things up in dictionaries- easier to use the written example to follow and gradually get used to the differences with the English alphabet through using the dictionary a lot!

I certainly got to a level of reading Welsh where I could read novels for first language speakers without having sat down and learned the alphabet off by heart- but then, if you find it comes easily to you, it could be quite useful!

If you don’t find it coming easily I wouldn’t worry (or consequently waste too much time on it)- it will come to you as you get further into the course :blush:

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I salute you, Sir! I always get fooled by forgetting that a word could simply be mutated! Aspirants are OK but simply dropping a ‘g’ is forever throwing me! (Obviously only for words I don’t use often!).

Oh, pshaw, henddraig!

It’s just a matter of time doing it, there’s nothing to be proud of or admired about it! Just mentioning it as showing you can to it without learning the alphabet!

There’s a certain type of person learning Welsh who likes to show how superior they are by reading books in Welsh, I hope to God I’m not one of them!

But if you do want to, there’s a wider field of good stuff out there which I’ve really enjoyed reading, all different styles, different genres, some easier and some harder (like every literature in every language!) - far wider and - well, better and more enjoyable! - than I was expecting before I started.

I don’t understand why “the alphabet” is the first thing ever taught in a foreign language. So often the letter itself has got little relation to the sound it represents - they should teach it phonetically, it would make things so much simpler …

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The Welsh alphabet is generally taught phonetically (rather than the lesser used version which gives the slightly more abstract ‘names’ of the letters as in “Es pedwar ec” ).