Aaaaaand, I’m back! Anyway, here’s how I got on with Welsh!
Ahhh, Welsh.
At some point, I will dedicate some more serious time to you.
The thing is, I did try. I clocked in my 30 mins every day (and I was pretty focused for it, too!) and I tried out lots of different resources.
But honestly, it’s been reallllllly difficult to focus. And I know I always had the option to just take a few days, step back—but I also know myself and I know, if I’d done that, I wouldn’t have come back.
So, it wasn’t really an option. Instead, I’ve pushed through and I might instead revisit Welsh when I’ve done with all the other languages this year, just for a little refresher.
As a result, my video isn’t… great. It’s taken a lot more work than the others, but hopefully it’s not the worst thing you all have ever seen!
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-sCt5cHjf9/
What did I get done?
I got to the second checkpoint on Duolingo, which I don’t think is all that bad. I also spent a lot of time on Memrise and uTalk (mostly because uTalk always definitely has audio, whereas Duolingo was computer voices and Memrise was kind of hit and miss).
I also dabbled with Glossika, Teach Yourself, and the free course on LearnWelsh.cymru. The good thing about these endangered UK languages (or at least the two I’ve done so far!) is that there does seem to be a good amount of free, high-quality resources that can be used.
How do I feel about this language?
I really liked it! It was similar enough to Scottish Gaelic that I was catching connections with structure, but different enough that I didn’t feel like I was going around in circles. Plus, it’s fun to learn a new language and really hear where an accent has come from—though I don’t think I was especially good at it!
What was very cool is that the ‘ll’ sound in Welsh seems (to my ear) to be formed in a similar way to the ‘tl’ sound in Nahuatl. Made it a little bit easier!
What about those stats?
I studied Welsh for 566 minutes (9.43 hours) over 18 days, averaging out to approximately 31 minutes per day.
According to Memrise, I learnt 215 words, which seems about right, as I did the Duolingo course and then the uTalk topics I covered were related to what I’d learnt via that. I got 839 points on uTalk.
Here’s another lovely chart:
So, another breakdown of my study time and it’s easier to see how much more freedom I had with Welsh in terms of resources here. Unsurprisingly, Duolingo and Memrise absolutely dominate—I spent most of the 18 days just staring at my phone, so, what can you do, really?
What’s next?
Māori! I was going to switch this with BSL (because I was supposed to be going on the Polyglot Cruise, but it’s been rightly postponed), but we’re back on track now! Very excited to get started with this language; I learnt a little about it when it was Māori week last September and I can’t wait to learn more. I am a little behind on posting about it (unsurprisingly!) but the intro draft is done, so look out for that!
Hwyl!