+one for what Mike and Anthony said. Vocab sessions are great, but in the absence of them I had to turn to reading. You start by looking up every other word. But it improves to every third word and then every fourth word etc! I think a sticky thread should be made on ‘homemade tips for learning’. I have quite a few and would gladly share them.
I think i mentioned a level/course 4 in another thread. Just today I was thinking about how I would say things like ‘otherwise, you could’ or ‘if it wasn’t for…I would be…’ etc. These phrases which increase the complexity of sentence structure and allow you weave a more intricate story.
Mihil
There is a nice phrase for that actually (or for “were it not for”: oni bai
(so presumably, your phrase would be “oni bai … byddwn i …” (or baswn i … ).
Recently found this also, which is quite nice: “heb os nac oni bai” = “without doubt”
(or literally "without “if” or “were it not for…” ).
(However, I realise you were just giving an example there, and you are asking perhaps for a collection of ways of enriching our expressiveness in Welsh).
Echoing the things that @mikeellwood and @Mihil have mentioned - one of the most liberating things about SSIW I’ve found is the use of linking words (thanks to all those brainbendingly long sentences) and I often find myself trying to explain something and needing something extra to link two thoughts together.
Things like oni bai, and petai (have I heard fel petai, or am I making that bit up?) and lots more that I don’t know yet![quote=“mikeellwood, post:22, topic:9522”]
a collection of ways of enriching our expressiveness in Welsh
[/quote]
Exactly this!
Not that I’m expecting these things to tumble out of my mouth anytime soon BUT I do like getting into a complicated explanation of general stuff with myself when I’m mooching about.
I am very much a beginner having just completed Level 1, challenge 4. We all learn differently but I would have liked to start with some basic conversation - hello, how are you, my name is etc.
That said, I am enjoying what I am learning and hope I keep it going
I would find all of this useful. I sometimes wonder how much better I would be at speaking if I had just learnt through SSiW and not been to formal lessons. But I would have needed more levels, or vocab sessions, many more!
The things that really roll off my tongue, without me having to think about them, are things that I have learnt through SSiW, not just the precise phrases that are used (although many of them are), but also constructions that I can adapt and put in other combinations of verbs and nouns. That comes from the spaced repetition I think, and then using the phrases and hearing them jump out at you on the radio or when first language Welsh speakers are talking.
At different times, I make different progress with speaking, listening/understanding and reading. It depends on what I have been doing - if I have been doing double speed listening (I use not only the SSiW exercises, but audio children’s books, material from other courses (e.g. Popeth Cymraeg scripts are brilliant), anything that is an mp3 file that I can play on my phone), then I can understand people talking much more easily. If I have been doing quite a bit of reading, then that improves quite quickly. It seems obvious really - the more I do of something, the better I progress
Therefore, more speaking and constructing sentences is what I need. And with SSiW, I can pick up the pronunciation the first time I hear a word. I go to formal lessons because I think the more Welsh I throw at myself, the better. But I wonder whether that is what I should do, because listening to everyone struggling to pronounce the words we’re reading (including me) and stumbling over producing a whole fluent sentence doesn’t seem to get me very far!
So I need more SSiW, where I just say the first thing that comes into my head, because I don’t have time to think before Catrin starts talking.
Good expression that - “learner lag”, and I certainly have it also, when confronted by a real person speaking.
I’d be interested in Aran’s take on this, in due course. But in the meantime:
I’ve tried to accustom myself to fast speech by listening to a lot of Radio Cymru, concentrating on speech-oriented programmes. There’s nothing wrong with the music programmes of course (especially on a long car journey), but if it’s understanding speech you want, then you need to get used to listening to a lot of it. In terms of exposure to different words, you get more “bang per buck” with the pure speech programmes.
Perhaps because I’m a northern learner, I tend to gravitate towards northern presenters, such as Gary Wyn on Mondays at 12:00 (business programme), Dylan Iorwerth on Monday evenings at 18:00 (“Dan Yr Wyneb” - various topics), and John Walter on Wednesdays at 12:00 (topics around “Welshness”). But guests can come from anywhere, so it’s not necessarily 100% Gog-speak.
And because I am somewhat political, I like “Or Bae” on Friday lunchtimes (when Y Senedd is sitting anyway), introduced by Vaughan Roderick (a southern speaker).
For a real challenge (to me, anyway) there is the daily Taro’r Post (13:00 M-F), most often introduced by the southern speaking Gary Owen, who speaks like a machine gun! And because most of his guests are coming in by phone, or maybe skype, the audio quality is not always great - This is good in a way, as it’s more “life like”, as opposed to studio-bound professional broadcasters - good in the sense of more of a challenge…but more difficult to understand, for me at least.
At first when I tried listening to these sort of programmes on RC, I could only take a few minutes at a time. But gradually, as one’s vocabulary gets a bit bigger, and one just gets more used to it, I found I could extend my listening time, easily to 30 minutes, and nowadays much longer.
And with iPlayer of course, one can listen to a programme as often as one likes, pause it, stop it, repeat bits, etc. (And with the mobile app, one can download any programme to keep for up to 30 days, and play it “offline”, i.e. when out of wifi/internet range, without using up your data allowance).
Sorry folks - really meant to start working through these today - but as Iestyn will testify after a very yawny call today, I was really staggeringly knackered and generally useless today…
Interesting points @mikeellwood - some of which have actually come to the forefront in the last few days…
Stamina! I’ve found that to be something I need to work on. When we were chatting in Oxford on Tuesday it became clear that the more your brain works, the more tired it gets, the less flexible it becomes. Obvious when you write it down - but I needed to realise it myself! After a while I could only listen, and my brain felt as though it had no juice left for actual sentence formation.
Yes! You’ve brought to mind a couple of things here. I am not worried about the speed of the speech itself, but how fast I put it all together in my brain. It has become clear to me after months of working on listening and trying different things, that I can follow fast speech if it is clear and well constructed. I can’t (yet) if the person jumps about, as people tend to do. I DO think that I have been shying away from listening to programs and letting them wash over me. I’ve been concentrating hard on giving a program my full attention to pick up as much as I can. Perhaps it’s time to relax into it and spend some time pootling about with it on in the background.
Diolch yn fawr!
Okay - I’m now genuinely slightly intimidated by how much there is to get through in here… but let’s get started…
Two suggestions here - one, find a book that you know in English or (that can be tricky, because there aren’t all that many translations around, but they are out there) a book that you would be interested in if it were English - and then instead of looking stuff up each time you don’t know something, just circle it (in pencil if you’re a book-worshipping type like me, or highlight if you really want to go to town) and then have occasional sessions when you look up a bunch of stuff at once.
It should give you a good idea of how much of the gist you get without looking everything up - with that watermelon, for example, you’d have got on okay just knowing ‘some sort of edible thing’…
Make the accelerated listening exercises a daily ritual… You’re already doing brilliantly - but they will make a real difference, I promise - and they’ll get you ready for the Level 2 ones…
Not so much, from what I hear about Bootcamp! But if you feel like that, trust yourself and relax - it’s something that grows over time - and bear in mind you don’t always feel like talking at 100mph in English, either…
And don’t worry about practising every day. If you do, great, if you don’t, it’s really no loss. You’re never going to lose everything you’ve achieved - if it gets a bit rusty any time, you’ll be able to shake the rust off in your first hour-long conversation…
Whatever comes to mind first…
In my experience, it doesn’t really work like this - except for the most limited ‘I want a ticket, thank you’ kind of interactions - model interactions usually go off track very, very quickly - which is why we don’t organise the lessons on a topic basis.
How far have you got with the courses?
30 minute conversations + transcripts + translations coming soon, which I think are going to be a real help with vocab building…
I don’t think we’ll have a full Level 4, but it looks very likely we’ll have a kind of Level 3+. And I understand the pleasure of ‘lessons=progress’ - but you have done all the active learning you really need to - it’s usage is the key for you from now on…
With understanding - accelerated listening exercises, and then the 30 minute chats when they’re available…
I hope you’ll find the 30 minute chats help with this - our lesson production effort is all going towards Level 3 at the moment, and will be for a while yet…
Whereabouts are you, Richard? There might be Welsh-speakers closer than you think…
That sounds like a great idea - why not kick it off?
You should find some of those more sophisticated structures coming through in Level 3 in due course…
If you can keep track of the exact things that trip you up, it would be very helpful input - and might come through in an earlier lesson in a future iteration of the course…
The problem with this kind of stuff is that it’s not very flexible for the methodology - and once you have enough of the language to start talking, you usually pick up the two or three hello/start talking phrases quite quickly…
I strongly recommend you do exactly that, then! How/where are you learning? The less you think about mutations, the more they’ll come naturally…
Or, as Iestyn and I describe it when we’re being technical, ‘a pub’.
I think this is really the same thing as getting plenty of listening exposure (and that the 30 minute chats will help) - idioms are often the bit where you lose the thread (and then they oh what the heck??) - and you just need them to crop up often enough to start to get the contextual sense… [and diolch, definitely a bit better today! ]
MMmmmmm, yes and no. This is real - tiredness makes a huge difference - but pushing on through that tiredness as often as possible is a huge competitive advantage. You would flourish on Bootcamp - where we watch people descend into the pits of exhaustion in the first 3 or 4 days, and then realise that their brain has adapted to being able to produce Welsh even when exhausted…
I think tiredness may help to trigger ‘chunking’ - and that the more ‘chunking’ you do, the less energy it takes to produce your sentences…
That’s a generally good thing - but the focused listening is good as well - I think a lot of that is about intelligibility - so I hope our 30 minute monthly chats (coming soon!) will be helpful for you there, on a listen->read transcript->listen again->read translation->listen again basis…
But the gold standard for you right now, Cat, would be to have an hour’s one-on-one Welsh conversation each week. It would be a hugely valuable accelerator for you…
Oh, wait, is that it?!
Phewww…
Some hugely interesting and helpful stuff in there about general development of SSi - thank you! An unexpected bonus, because I was really thinking in terms of ‘help, how do I [x]?’ as I usually get on Facebook - but the ‘don’t answer my questions, just build me [THIS]’ is surprisingly helpful…
And I’m happy to keep this a long-running thread, too - I learn a huge amount from it, but I bet a lot of readers/lurkers do as well - so any questions, any time, fire away…
The one thing? Keep doing what you’re doing but continue building the challenges through level 4 to build a bigger vocabulary base. Even though I learn new vocab through radio, evening class, Celwydd Noeth etc I still find the best way of remembering new vocab are the challenges.
VERY interesting! I’m currently only just aware of the barrier of tiredness, having only just started having regular, purposeful sessions of speaking to others. So where as my natural inclination at that point would be to back off a bit and rest, perhaps you would say that might be when there is more work to be done?
I’ve already felt the concept of chunking, I think. Many of the patterns that used to be single words linked together, now belong in blocks, coming out altogether with hardly a thought - except for the individual adjustments that need tweaking (another skill altogether!). It is an intensely pleasant sensation - one which I would chase, actually. And, bearing in mind that I suspect I can only work with three or four blocks at a time, I’m keen for those blocks to be as packed with stuff as they can be, if that makes any sense.
How do you see the relationship between tiredness and chunking? I can get to the space where tired exists, no problem! I’d like to know what kind of things to do when I’m there!
I found by accident that reading books from the same author for a while really helped. I suppose it’s something to do with reinforcement of both style and vocabulary but it seemed to make soaking up new words a more natural process to the point where it’s possible to predict the meaning of a word from context. That’s it for this month’s random thought …
Yes, I think ‘press on through’ is very much the order of the day - in a similar way, this is how we’ve gone from tentatively encouraging people to consider doing two lessons in a row to running courses where people get through 50 lessons in 5 days…
Given that it’s early days for you with extended sessions, they’re bound to feel a bit intimidating and tiring - but get yourself to that position as often as possible, and you’ll find your tolerance comes on in leaps and bounds…
And really, you’re into the fun part. What to do when you get there? Keep on talking, buy more coffee, add gin, keep talking…
Right, well – after the Bywyd Blodwen Jones I was after something else I could get as an e-book, and tried one of Bethan Gwanas’ others not aimed at learners (I Botany Bay) . I find I’m alternating between looking up every single bloomin’ word and just letting it wash over me until I find I’ve completely lost the plot about two paragraphs ago…
So, going back to plan A: there a clearly more Asterixes and Anturiaethau Tintin out there, but I can’t say I really know any of them that well in any other language. Failing that, skimming through Gwales seems to leave me with Y Tywysog Bach (very formal in French, although less so in English translation, so wonder what the ‘flavour’ of the Welsh would be); Harri Potter (getting a bit tired of, but I do have it in multiple languages already, and it would have some quite everyday vocab and phraseology alongside the muggles and the quidditch); or Bible Stories for Children.
Of those options, I think I’d prefer the Little Prince, if it’s not too stilted.
Any other suggestions that anyone knows of? Y Hobbit? Ty ar Cornel Pŵ?
There are quite a few Roald Dahl, if that would be of interest - and at least some David Walliams. Also plenty of Julia Donaldson, although I’d see that as a bit on the limited side for you.
I second Pluen, I’m reading it at the moment. At bootcamp I also read the first few chapters of the translation of David Williams’ gangsta granny which was pretty accessible.
