My mother left the Cynon Valley for the Midlands in the late 1950’s (not her choice) and married an Englishman (definitely her choice!) and I came along shortly afterwards. I’ve alays considered my Welwh heritage as central to my lif and, now that I’m retired, I have the time to spend learning the language skills that my mother was denied as a child.
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I moved to North Wales from California 7 years ago. Learning the language of my new home country seemed like an important way to settle in and become a part of the community. I am far from proficient but keep plugging away. Welsh speaking friends have been so encouraging. It certainly isn’t easy but it has been a good decision by far.
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Dwi’n bron yn saith deg ac dwi’n moyn dysgu siarad Cymraeg cyn i mi farw. Ges i fy ngheni yng nghymru ond dwi’n wedi byw yn lloegr rhan fwyaf o fy mywyd.
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Welsh, to me, is an ancient song from which I would like to understand the lyrics and eventually sing along. In harmony.
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I am half Welsh /irish brought up in England. I now live in South Wales. My father was a Welsh speaker and wanted me to learn Welsh. I found that very difficult living in England.
Now I live here it would be awesome to speak to my Welsh speaking friends in their language.
Today I spoke my first full sentence and told I sound very good. I guess I have a head start on being able to make sounds English people often find difficult.
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Hello all, so after putting it off for no real good reason other than being a bit nervous I finally had my first conversation in Welsh today - and it was great! I live in London and don’t have anyone I know nearby who speaks Welsh so I took advantage of the brilliant 1:1 and discussion resource on the SSiW Slack channel.
I can’t thank Nia enough for her patience and encouragement and was lucky that nobody else joined today so I had half an hour of conversation almost entirely in Welsh. I was in work and it was the strangest feeling going back to my desk and actually having to think for a second or two to speak in English as I’d been concentrating so hard - something I never thought would happen!
I’ve crammed doing the three levels of the new course and a level and a half of the old course into about four months and definitely need to revisit challenges but learning with SSiW has been such a positive experience for me so far and I am still on a real high after realising I held a decent(ish) conversation over a good amount of time.
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That is amazing! Llongyfarchiadau, Andrew 
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I want to learn Welsh because it is my heritage. My birth place. Grew up elsewhere but maternal relatives are all Welsh speakers
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Once again a BIG diolch to everyone who has, and continues to contribute to this wonderful thread! It brings us so much joy to read your inspiring stories, so please keep them coming!
If you’re also happy to send us a photo to go with your story then we’d be very happy to receive them! Diolch!
For those of you finding this thread for the first time, this is what it’s all about…
Helo bawb!
If you’re currently learning Welsh with SaySomethinginWelsh (not Duolingo
), please tell us why you’re learning Welsh and what your experience of learning with SSiW is like?
Why do we ask? Well…
SSiW’s new website has a Learner’s Stories page where we would love to add your story and your picture!
So, If you have a story to tell about your Welsh learning journey (with SSiW and not Duolingo
Oh and please don’t forget the picture/selfie!
Diolch to you all!
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I didn’t expect to move to Wales. I came to the UK from America to study after all that time home during Covid made me decide to finally in my late 30’s pursue a degree. My partner is from England, so I looked into universities across the UK. I chose Bangor because I was going for education and there’s a lot of really amazing stuff happening in Wales regarding education, but I knew nothing of Wales or Welsh culture beyond hills and sheep and a language that’s said to have inspired Elvish in Lord of the Rings.
I came to check out the area a few months before moving and I couldn’t get enough of all the Welsh, looking up how to pronounce town names and street names and wondering what “wedi” could possibly mean. At first I thought, if I’m going to live here, where this language is obviously important to people, out of respect as an immigrant and an American, I thought I ought to at least learn enough to order in a cafe or talk about the weather.
But then, the more I learned of Welsh, the more Welsh I wanted to learn. It reminded me of the parts of school I most enjoyed as a kid. I had some lessons at Bangor Uni and used that app (you know the one), but when I decided to switch to a degree in Welsh, someone recommended Say Something in Welsh.
I regret not starting with SSiW sooner! Learning a language just takes time and practice and there’s no shortcut, but SSiW sure feels like hacking your brain sometimes. I’m amazed at how it makes it feel like it’s getting easier. I’m not sure exactly what’s happening, but it sure feels like you can feel your brain being exercised and becoming more adept.
Learning Welsh has honestly shaped my career goals and aspirations and been just one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Say Something in Welsh is the best resource for learning I’ve found so far.
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This is an epic story Joshua! Thank you so much for sharing and huge congratulations to you on your learning journey! 
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Living as I do in Asia, the question often arises in small talk in social settings, as to where I’m from. Most assume I’m English. So I go on about how the Welsh are different from ( and superior to) the English. I generally fake the ability to speak Welsh by reciting parts of Ein Tad, or Hen Wlad etc. One of these days I’m going to get found out, so that is one of my reasons for learning.
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As a Canadian, that sounds a lot like what I would say to some Europeans (when they would assume I was American) I met on my travels there in the 80s and 90s. 
Now that I know a lot more about the experience of the indigenous and colonized (and I include the Welsh here), I’m not sure I have had a lot to complain about. 
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Hi, I have been learning Welsh for about 15 months, on-line with University of South Wales and more recently with SSiW. I have built a good foundation with the Uni course and find that SSiW is pushing my use of the language to new levels. I live away from Wales so don’t have a chance of speaking in Welsh regularly, the SSiW course is allowing me to speak every day Welsh and that’s great.
I’m now used to the speed of SSiW and cover each unit in two days by doing a full unit three times. I use the pause button a fair bit on the first pass but by the third time I’m pretty comfortable to get the 80% suggested success and then move on,
This is my own method as I’m sure other learners will have their own approach
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Y tro cyntaf i mi glywed Cymraeg, rhywbeth newydd, a rhywbeth hynafol, wedi cynnau y tu mewn i mi.
Not long before my recent trip to Europe, including Wales, I heard the Welsh language through the band Swnamii; learned that I have Welsh heritage including directly to Rhodri Mawr, to people who helped found and settle a couple American states. That all got me to start watching some Welsh-language channels on YouTube, listening to Radio Cymru, begin teaching myself some phrases. In the week I was in Wales, I got to where I could go for a few lines in Welsh Only with someone. Can’t wait to go back in a couple months! Will be based in Powys. If you know any Welsh-language meetups there, or if you and / or yours would like to meet up publicly for a drink and talk, please feel free to drop me a private line. I’m also on the Slack app for peeps learning this language.
On my return home from Europe, I searched the net for some options to increase my Cymraeg. I found https://learnwelsh.cymru/. I also found SSiW.
Speaking at and beyond intermediate levels with individual native speakers = what interests me most about learning a language. So far I’ve found SSiW to deliver pretty well on that front. After only one challenge people can speak complete, meaningful, and useful sentences. I also enjoy that the course’s much more Welsh than English. I’m doing the North Wales course, with Aran and Catrin captaining that ship, and they both have excellent voices for such a project. I really appreciate hearing the language in both a male and a female voice as I learn.
One thing that frustrates me with some SSiW challenges would be the continual hiccups in them. Such as when a challenge has multiple instances where there’s little to no time to say a longer sentence remotely intelligibly. I’m not talking about a need to speak faster here like when one can maybe Mach 5 a line in time during some challenges. I mean that it’s impossible for someone to even begin to say the line in a way that’s positive and productive without immediate interruption. In other places there are multiple examples when one speaker or the other adds or subtracts, in the follow-ups, things that were or weren’t originally spoken; or one voice disappears altogether a few times in a challenge; or when somebody keeps saying the incorrect word before it’s later corrected. About the latter I’m not talking differences in pronunciation, variations, or mutations.
When the challenges are humming SSiW can be a lotta learning and fun. Heaven knows how much work went into making SSiW as good as it can indeed get. Additionally, only fourteen challenges in, I do find my enjoyment and progress more impeded when a challenge has the aforementioned trip-ups throughout it.
Diolch yn fawr iawn i bobl am eu hamser, eu hymdrechion a’u gwasanaeth.
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I started with SSiW back in 2015 when I started dating a Welsh man, and got quite far through but life happened and it all kind of stopped for a bit. I married that Welsh man last year and am now 6 months pregnant with our first baby, who we want to raise bilingually Welsh/English (in England for extra difficulty!). So I’m hoping to restart and as I had such success with SSiW before this is where I came back to, I only need to stay ahead of the baby’s language acquisition!
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Croeso nol.
Shmae hello well I have always had a love for languages since I was five in the 1960s and fortunate to have been taken on holidays most years in my childhood, travelling in the car with Mum, Dad and my older brother, on the continent, picking up bits of French German and Italian. I’ve since learnt that if you can be exposed to languages before the age of twelve you can make little compartments for each of them more easily. That may or may not be true but what it did give me was an understanding that you do not have to be stressed learning a language. You will learn it all the better if you just relax. I’ve been lucky as these early experiences taught me to enjoy having a go and not to worry about making mistakes, I know this is something you highlight and I so agree. You get so much more out of communicating with someone in their language if you really dont mind making mistakes. It somehow goes against the grain of how we are all normally taught but is just the best thing if you can just relax and let go.
I have studied French Spanish Italian and now Welsh and Greek and can get by quite nicely in the first three but the main thing is that I am not perfect, who is fluent? I just love having a go and I find that the native speakers really appreciate your efforts to speak their language and will help you all the more even if you make a hash of it!
Regarding Welsh, in the war my Dad was first evacuated as a child and then billeted, strangely enough to the same place in Bangor, North Wales. I presume the family he stayed with must have been Welsh speakers as often during our family meals he would suddenly come out with some Welsh and his piece de resistance was the famous long place name Llanfyrpwyllgyll….sorry cant even spell it! Anyway, I think this is where my interest in the language stems, that combined with our weekend days which we often spent in North Wales and my friends who were taken to the Eisteddford every year but to which I never went and always wanted to. I think I have always had a little Welsh language compartment in my brain waiting to be filled. I had thought of learning it of course but couldnt imagine where I could find lessons. I caught the end of what I now think must have been Arran on Jeremy Vine’s show some years ago and was thrilled to see a different approach to learning with similarities to the Michel Thomas method, which I had found and recommended to friends a few years before. I didnt know how to find this course though and didn’t follow it up. Then during the Afghan evacuation I found myself in bed recuperating after chemotherapy treatment and watching sky news and an advert came up for Duo Lingo. Like the other person posting I couldnt believe they did Welsh! I literally signed up seconds later. I was absolutely thrilled to bits. I had a long period of chemo and of course for most of the time it was during Covid so I wasnt able to do anything or go anywhere but I could learn Welsh. Twelve months later I found myself medically retired from work and sharing with the director my Welsh journey. This is when I heard about the SSW app as he had been using the app himself. It was absolutely brilliant, I was so excited to find it and I’ve just now discovered the Auto Magic which is even more brilliant. It really covers all the bases you need to be able to speak Welsh and the only course you need, I seem to be on the right side of things now but am still finding lots of time to learn Welsh every day on your course. I am going to a family do in August in Wales so hope to have the opportunity to do some practising! I’m quite determined to “ get by” in Welsh very soon. Thanks so much for developing such a brilliant and easy course that literally gives everyone the opportunity to speak Welsh. Diolch yn fawr.
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