I agree completely about changing the thread, I was actually starting to feel a bit awkward for going so much off-topic on just my second day on the forum! So if someone who is in the position to do it would kindly move our posts I think it would be better:) In the meanwhile I took the liberty to create a thread for us in the Other languages section and posted my answer there Slavic languages
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That offer means we just started 
As it happens, weāre about to start testing our new course creation tool with a bunch of different languages - so doing some testing with Russian would be fantastic. Iām away this week at the Eisteddfod, and then we have another 3 weeks left of school holidays (when I keep work to an absolute minimum) but from the beginning of September this is going to be our main focusā¦
Tatjana - ooh, I do! I do remember ādober danā! Whatās thank-you? I might remember that tooā¦
As for going off-topic - unless the original topic is something of particular importance, I think discussions that go off-topic are one of the great joys of the forum
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Well, you can count on me anytime - it would be a great pleasure to help with such a course! Iām really enjoying the SSI approach myself and would certainly recommend people learning Russian to use it, if it were available.
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In about four weeks, youāll be asking why no-one on here warned youā¦
But as a bonus - by the time we have the makings of a Russian course, because of the way the tool works, weāll be pretty close to having a Welsh course available through the medium of Russian, which will be enormous funā¦ 
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OdliÄno!
āHvala.ā or āHvala vam.ā (formal or to more people) 
āHvala ti.ā (informal) āHvala vama.ā (if there are to persons you need to thank to).
Doesnāt that ātiā sound familiar to you?
Oh, yes, I know this joy the most maybe ā¦ when conversation takes you beyond the limits and you come from āwhy you learn welshā topic to āwhat did you eat odayā and back to original and toward another unimaginal subject of different kind. I was just worried though we might āwander into too deep forrests of no returnā - hehe
I actually love your attitude toward this @aran.
Yup, SSi makes wonders. I was stubborn nerd at the time I came here and look what those people made out of me ā¦ Joyful and chearful āold ladyā prepared to learn the way the language should be learnt. SSi WAY!
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Oh, I enjoy a challenge:) Otherwise I wouldnāt probably even attempted at trying to learn a Celtic language - theyāre considered terribly difficult.
This is wonderful, Iām sure Iāve seen people on Russian forums asking for a Welsh course in Russian. And Iām trying to talk someone into learning it with me:smile:
Iām actually reading your topic right now, with your progress reports, and find it very motivating.
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O boy! 
Iām blushing. Surely @aranās posts and those of other members who posted in āmyā topic are those motivating ones, not mine. - hehe
Siriously enough, thank you. Iām honoured if at least someone finds something motivating and inspiring in those posts of mine. However I can confidently say I feel much better with all lately happenings in my life what concerns being on here and learn Cymraeg too. There are people on here and on @clecs who made me happy and that includes Clecs themselves.
(ups, flown away again, joyfully).
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@tatjana So glad to āhearā the joy in your voice in that last post, and to know that you are feeling better about things lately
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Well, actually I find motivating all of them, but also just the fact that someoneās writing a honest account of her battle with perfectionism is very helpful! Itās my big problem, so I find your postings very familiar and reassuring at the same time (because I know youāre still here and that youāre learning and happy with it)
Oh, and clecs seems like a great place, I hope Iāll be able to join one day, just when Iām able to put together something more eloquent than ādw iān mynd i siopa achos dw iān moyn prynu bwydā
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Donāt wait until then. I admit I canāt understand half of things written there, probably because theyāre written and not spoken, but Google Translate is fair good helping tool so Iām just pushing on.
My strategy of Clecs-ing: I try to read a āclecā then I try to (quickly) establish what I understood out from written,. Then I copy the āclecā and put it into the Google Translate to establish if I really understood it correctly. Most of the time I matched at least the context of it. When replying I write the reply into Google Translate Welsh to English way what means I write it in Welsh and see the translation of it. If I want to use the word I donāt know I either check into dictionarry or go for translation with Google Translate but I NEVER copy/paste this new word into my sentence but rather manually type it into it so I can memorize it in time. The same goes with the whole sentences. Even if it doesnāt go Welsh-English way but rather oposite way I first check if there can something I already know be used and when sentence is ready to write it down I type it manually into the clecs box so I create a possibility of remembering it in a time. You can of course save your favourite translations into Google Translate if you have Google acount and use them later but even that way Iād type them manually to ensure I would be able to type/write things in Welsh without that one day.
Might seam complicated and takes a bit of time but itās rewarding at the end. So, join us before you think youāre really ready. You know this āwhen Iāll be readyā is also part of our (yours and mine) common problem of being perfectionist. Letās get rid of this silly problem! SSi way praises mistakes so should FINALLY we, too!
(Gee, who would tell, my inspiration goes high today.)
Dych chiān iawn:) Youāve convinced me to join, even just to read the things that people write, without writing so much at first. After all, we learners should get all the exposure to the language that we can, especially if we donāt live in the country where the language is spoken!
By the way, you have a very interesting way of using google translate. I must admit Iāve always tried to ban it in my classroom, because some students just use it in the lazy way - translating everything and copypasting it into their written assignments (which results in very clumsy and funny sentences sometimes). But the way you use it seems much more helpful, more like using a real dictionary.
Da iawn! Thatās the spirit!
When one among your students will learn a lesson of Google Translate copy/pasting the hardest way ever, resulting into even loosing some friends forever (if even online ones) then theyād retreat from copy/pasting forever. Actually I didnāt do anything wrong but just had written on twitter something about policy and stuff in my native language - Slovene - the hardest way one could ever do. However publishing that I only realized that someone of my foreign online friends might be interested in what Iāve written and would want to translate the tweet with Google Translate. Actually one of them did so and it was to late to retreat the tweet as he already got rid of me, blocking me all the way because he was insulted due to Google Translate false translation. The text was not personally aimed to anyone but when you translated it with Google Translate it appeared as if I want to insult the whole universe not just people on the Earth because google understands word to word translation many too often and doesnāt take context of the word structure into considderation. For that matter when I aim to publish something like that again on social media I always translate things into English by myself so that there could not possibly be missunderstandings. This way Iām always afraid I tend to write the wrong structure in Cymraeg too so Google translate is only my helping hand in understanding things and ordering words into right way possiblly using the words and structures I already have learnt. If something looks suspicious to me Iād go and search more resources to asure I am writing what I want to tell to the people the right way.
And, to all who say Google Translate is clumsy for Cymraeg translations, yes it might be, Iām the last to judge that, but I know for sure for the Slovene language itās not just worse but horrible. So, if you have any doubt what Iāve written somewhere in Slovene, better ask me then translate things with Google Translate. Well, āprosimā, āhvalaā, ādober danā and such tiny thingys youāll surely get right translated, no fear for that though.
I have reason to communicate with someone from Thailand on a fairly frequent basis. While her English is better than my Thai (SSIThai anyone?) it isnāt that good. When she uses Google Translate it is even more incomprehensible and a 30 second voice mail via FB is much better.
Oh, Iām sorry youāve had such an unpleasant situation because of google translate. Iāll warn my students. Iāve only had some funny situations myself: I have mostly Russian-speaking friends on facebook, so all my news and the things I post, like quotes from books or news I found interesting, are all in Russian of course. But I have a British friend, who, as he doesnāt know Russian, has to read the automatic translations of my postings. He sometimes sends these translations to me, and they always look very funny and clumsy, just because the system canāt take into consideration the context and sometimes chooses the wrong meaning of the word (if it has multiple meanings). Translators have lots of jokes about automatic translations! But I donāt consider google translate a universal evil, of course:smile: It can be very useful, especially if you donāt want to carry around some heavy dictionaries.
I think Google translate is pretty good these days (Bing isnāt too bad either). However, the advice Iāve seen given, and it makes sense to me, is that the way to use GT is from your target language(s) into your first language (or at least into a language that you already know extremely well).
The reason for this is that unfortunate, clumsy, or downright āwrongā translations immediately show up in your first language, and then using your existing knowledge of the target language, and perhaps a dictionary or two, you can then refine the translation into something better.
Using it in the other direction should only be done with extreme caution, if at all.
BTW, from here, http://gweiadur.com/blog/en/gweiadur-helps-improve-google-translate-for-welsh
the people at Gweiadur.com ( D. Geraint Lewis & colleagues) have been working to make GT better for Welsh.
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Thatās what I wanted to point out, but I even was not guilty for anything (if you read my previous story of GT experience).
GT is settled one can help in any language to improve it but mostly Iām too eager to form a reply to something when using it I usually donāt bother + it mixes Slovene and Croatian-Serbian words together and I found improovment atempts a bit hopeless for Slovene. Iād have to sit through the whole day, putting all sorts of things iāve encounterred them wrong once and correcting things, then work woudl maybe be fruitful otherwise itās hopeless. It seams like FB sometimes where Slovenian version was once upon a time up to 95 % translated but now itās only 69 % according to the data FB reports to us who are in translating programe. No matter how you try to improove things they kept being mixing with English phrases and one sentence looks something like this: āVaÅ”/a prijatelj tagged you in the slika you posted.ā Prety cool. isnāt it? GT stucks into Slovenian-Serbo-Croatian way like this ā¦
Just that much. With English itās always easy. If Iād translate things from my native language into Cymraeg ā¦ oh, God, I donāt recommend this at all!
Just to be clear, I wasnāt aiming my comment at you specifically; it was meant to be very general. But your experience seems to illustrate the dangers. To re-phrase what I was trying to say, GT is a great tool for personal use in understanding a foreign text (ābreaking the backā of the translation, as a first step before a proper ārefinedā translation or at least understanding). But it obviously has limitations.
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I understood you perfectly, donāt worry and ā¦ do you remember āBabblefishā? That one was the best for me and it even translated the whole texts quite properly, however it didnāt contain Slovene, but since I can English quite well it wasnāt a problem. I believe this translator doesntā exist anymore unfortunatelly or it renamed to something else and changed ā¦
As a translator, I am very glad that Google Translate is still not perfect! Itās hard enough to find work as it is, with the recession!
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