Well I have just finished Course 3 and am glowing all over.
Glowing all over because I celebrated by watching Wales’ rugby teams’s slim victory yesterday on S4C - and found to my glee that I could understand a little more and enough to make it very enjoyable. Eirwen asked me if I wanted to watch it on an English channel and I was happy to say ‘‘No - definitely not’’.
Which means I can spend time with Eirwen, whose first language is Welsh, watching more and more programs on Welsh TV’-S4C. So learning Welsh is life-changing for both me and for the time I spend with Eirwen.
I am always a little nervous when someone is listening in the background when I am doing the course - and doubly so when it is Eirwen. I suppose it is natural not to want to make a fool of myself. By turning the sentences into a bit of a joke when I pronounce them, I find I now look forward to having Eirwen, or anyone else in the room when I am doing the course.(For example, I will modify your sentence and pronounce something like ‘‘everyone is very happy when they forget Eirwen’s birthday’’ and then watch for a reaction!!!)
I think you have created a very powerful technique when toward the end of each course you pull everything together and have us use all the vocabulary and some of the trickier patterns. Just in case we were becoming too comfortable! Lessons 24 and 25 of Course 3 are excellent for pushing us a little harder. I am also a little humbler for it!!
A question - do you have any advice for how to progress after Course 3, and how to use saysomething.com to best advantage going forward??
Many, many, many and many thanks for such an enriching and productive language 'learning experience - second to none.
Have you done the new Level 1 course yet? I would definitely recommend it if you haven’t! The new listening practices are to be recommended especially… I know that Aran has plans for post-Course/Level 3 content, but this is likely to be available only once the new Level 3 material is done, so there may be a wait involved! I am in the same position as you, having completed Course 3 some time ago now. I still use the SSiW materials a lot for revision, for intensive days and for fun, and I supplement those with meet-ups, Skype chats, a bit of reading and generally trying to do something in Welsh every day (not that easy in England).
It’s a bit of a challenge here in Italy, too, speaking Welsh everyday.
Gradually, I’ll speak more Welsh with Eirwen.
If I can summon up the energy I’ll trawl the broader area around here from Nice to San Remo to find some Welsh speakers who would like to meet together
Llongyfarchiadau mawr iawn iawn. That is a huge achievement - and even with your thoroughly well-deserved current levels of pride, it will probably take a while (and some good exposure) before you fully realise what a remarkable amount you’ve taken on board.
I echo what Stu says about Level 1 - you’ll fly through the earlier stages, but the listening exercises will probably be a gear-change for you - they have been for a number of other already advanced learners. We’ve got the beginnings of Level 2 being published already (and they’ll carry on fairly regularly) which will also lead to more accelerated listening exercises - so there’ll be a lot of stuff there that will be genuinely valuable for you.
That apart, I recommend that you try to get a weekly conversation session going with Eirwen - perhaps a Welsh evening? If you have one session of an hour of active conversation each week, it will turn what you’ve already internalised into a genuinely comfortable level of usage in very short order.
I’ll look forward enormously to hearing how the next few months go for you, and many, many congratulations once again for this superb achievement
I’m going to have to agree with what Stu and Aran said - Level 1 is mostly just revision when you’ve done Course 3 (though it does introduce different ways of saying things), but from what I can tell, Level 2 actually introduces brand new vocabulary.
My goal for this past Christmas was to speak a few phrases in Welsh, enough to have my wife, Eirwen, know I cared about the Welsh language. I think that a new goal of speaking Welsh with Eirwen for 30 minutes each (one hour total) is a really great one. Thank you for the idea. I will start with trials of 10 minutes or so each and then build up , hopefully, to 30 minutes each by the end of April. This May will be a great test for me because I will be spending just short of a week in North Wales centred around a wedding. I will be able to spend time with relatives who speak Welsh continuously in their homes and I am going to ask them to PLEASE, PLEASE DO NOT SWITCH TO ENGLISH when I walk in the room.
I will threaten them to support England instead of Wales in the next 6 nations rugbyif they utter a single word of English. This should do the trick!!
If all goes well, I have two more family weddings in North Wales in 2015 in which to keep stretching the goal. I am hoping that a longer term goal of one hour°s conversation in Welsh by each of us by Christmas 2015 might be feasible. Let°s face it I would be hard be hard pressed to do that, even in English without a couple of glasses of wine to help me along!!
In the meantime, I will transition massively from doing lessons to lot°s of listening and attempted spontaneous speaking.
Having said that I have just completed the New Level 1 ’ lesson 25 (I decided, rightly or wrongly, to initially skip the first 24 lessons. I promise to seek out the listening sessions later). I can°t tell you how much I love the final consolidation lesson at the end of each course. They are so, so helpful. I keep them on my ipod to counter any periods of Welsh famine!! I will tune into the New Level 2 lessons on a casual basis and await the final consolidation lesson with baited breath.
Llongyfarchiadau on completing the course Justin, I still haven’t got to the end on course 3 and I’ve been going for 3 and a half years so I admire your achievement.
I know that to ‘qualify’ for a bootcamp (a week speaking nothing but Welsh) you need to have finished course 1 and the vocab units so you have surpassed that requirement a long time ago and there is no doubt at all that you can survive very easily in nothing but Welsh. This might be controversial or a scary thought or whatever but to me it seems so obvious. If Eirwen is a fluent, first language Welsh speaker why speak English at all to each other any more? It would be like a permanent bootcamp and your language skills would go through the roof in a really short time frame. I’m actually jealous of the opportunity that presents itself to you.
I love languages having discovered late in life, through research, that my grandmother spoke 6 while I spoke only one - English. So, I have worked since at adding French, Italian, Spanish, lately Welsh and I am working currently at Hebrew. I try to keep an separate activity for each language so that it ‘‘lives’’. I play tennis in French, shop in Italian, watch films in Spanish and hope to watch TV and converse with Eirwen in Welsh.
Back to the core of your observation. One of the most difficult things to change is the language with which you begin a relationship. So while I would love to speak Welsh to Eirwen all the time - it will be quite a while before that takes over from English. I will try and yes I am really lucky that I have the opportunity to try.
It would be great to meet up. We’ll try to make it happen.
Also, Eirwen and I have been talking about your luxury Bootcamp.
We would really like to do something like that - probably in 2016. Do you have an idea what Eirwen’s role could be and whether the Bootcamp would be right for a pair like us?
If not, is there any other similar, friendly activity centred around Welsh that you can think of?
