Big Welsh Challenge

[Tegernacus]

www.bbc.co.uk/wales/learnwelsh/bigwelshchallenge/

This is a fantastic site (from a web-geek point of view). The tutor videos are especially good if you've never heard/spoken Welsh before, and starts at the VERY basic, hello and goodbye etc. North and South Wales variants included (although they're not mixed, you either choose the South Wales version of the tutorial or the North Wales version).

I would recommend that all the members of this forum at least check it out, or do the whole thing. Try it, anyhow.

[megli]

Noble stuff!

[Tegernacus]

small steps, obviously. But half of the challenge of Welsh is the pronunciation, and that's kind of hard to do unless you have regular exposure to it, which is why I think this format is great. I got sent the link by a couple of people I know that are following it, and to be fair they're coming on quite well, can carry out basic conversations, which is pretty amazing coming from people who had a hard time even pronouncing place-names a week or two ago.

[megli]

That's very good. I found/find the biggest problem is all the different forms of the word for 'is' - sy(dd), mae, oes, ydy, yw etc and learning under what circumstances each is appropriate. The amount of vocabulary one needs to have a decent conversation about anything interesting is also an uphill task - but a deeply life-enhancing one!

[Midori]

Which is the more widely spoken? I have heard much more Welsh spoken in the North than in the South.

Which would most folk choose?

Cheers, Midori

[Tegernacus]

There isn't that much between them, its kind of like the difference between Home-counties English and Yorkshire English. It's more in the accent, in the way certain words and phrases are pronounced. Personally, I think that unless you plan on living in the North, the South Wales variant is slightly easier to understand. Think of SW as "BBC News" Welsh, plain and straighforward (that would be the English influence probably). North Welsh is far more musical.. but unless you are familiar with the Welsh accent would be slightly harder to get your head around. (I've got relatives up North and I find them hard to understand at times, the accent is so strong).

If your desire to dabble is more from an esoteric, historical point of view, for personal use only, then... dunno. Megli, is the North Wales variant older, or did they evolve at the same time?

[megli]

No, they're one language, neither is older than the other, any more than Warwickshire English is older than Kent English.

People get fixated on the differences between N and S Walian Welsh, forgetting that there are other dialects and that a N/S divide is a crude one at best. (I have an infuriating friend who has refused to learn SW because she only feels a spiritual connection with the N, and the classes here happen to be provided by someone from Cardiff. Upshot: she now can't speak/read Welsh at all.)

I too find SW much easier to understand - Glyn from Big Brother with his Bangor (?) nasal drawl was pretty opaque to me.

The differences are as follows:

a different construction for doing 'have' prevails in the N.
The North has an extra way of doing the past tense with the word ddaru 'happened', which doesn't exist in the S.
'he' is e in the south but o in the N.
In the south, u and i are identical; in the north, they are distinct.
The south tends to pronounce initial chw- as hw- or even w-.
There are a number of words which are simply different - about 20. (eg. 'out' is 'allan' in the north but 'mas' in the S.)
And most obviously final -au or -ai is pronounced -e in the S but -a in the North. (So 'chwarae' 'to play' comes out as hware or ware in in the S but chwara in the N.)
The S has a variant negative present tense of ';to be' which is 'sa i, so fi...' hence the typically S phrase, 'sa i'n gwbod', 'dunno', which wd be dwn i ddim or dw i ddim yn gwybod in the N.

W dialectology is absolutely fascinating and has a lot of local variation. If you want to learn the language properly you have to be familiar with all the dialects, but the difficulties of this have been greatly exaggerated.

[megli]

The N vs S variation is very old btw (for all its crudeness) - you can see traces of distinctly S language in Culhwch and Olwen for example, c. 1000, especially the hw- for chw-.

[Heron]

As Megli says, the distinctions between North and South Welsh is a simplification. Much of the 'hwntws' dialects of Glamorgan say, died out when Welsh ceased to be widely spoken there and many of the children who learnt there Welsh in school in these areas as the Language has been revived are taught by teachers from the North. There are some natural southern dialects from places like the Swansea valley and its easy to forget that although the percentage of Welsh speakers in areas like this are much lower than in Gwynedd, the NUMBER of speakers is greater as the population densities are higher. Then there are dialects like that of N Pembrokeshire where a number of much older written forms are preserved, the 'hwech' for 'Chwech' mentioned by Megli, and 'Wes' instead or the more standard 'oes' etc. Cardiganshire Welsh is different again, though a 'southern' dialect ('llaeth' for milk instread of the northern 'llefrith') it sounds nothing like what you would hear further south. Even within the 'Northern' dialect areas there's big difference between,say, someone from Bala and someone from Caernarfon town.

But the point is, learning to pronounce single words, names, even short phrases, doesn't require anyone to speak in any dialect. That's only necessary if you actually want to speak Welsh to other locals. Then you need to learn the Welsh spoken where you live. Otherwise I'd say just stick to being able to know how the vowels and consonants sound.

[megli]

Yes it's a very misguided thing to say that you can't/won't learn W because of the dialects (like my infuriating friend) - partly thanks to the mass media and a large volume of publications in the language, mutually-intelligibility is simply not an issue, especially as there is a dialectical continuum. They're just not that different. (Unlike Irish, where there are three really quite variant dialects separated by wide areas of purely English-speaking territory.) It wd be possible to speak a slightly standardised form based on media welsh if you wanted to. Personally I find that I just fall into using the forms used by whoever I'm speaking to.

(I like Swansea valley welsh best, but that's only because that's what I'm used to!) If you read Welsh there's a little book on the dialects called Cymraeg, Cymrag, Cymreg, which is by the aunt of a friend of mine.

[dreamguardian]

Started to learn Welsh when I moved to Wales over 4 years ago. The differences I found more to be with which teaching method is being used.

I've adapted to the more colocial 'spoken' Welsh as opposed to 'book Welsh' - Native speakers terms not mine

Rob

[megli]

A Triad for would-be learners of Welsh:

Three Great Teachers of the Language of the Cymry, whose books should be bought:
Gareth King, Gareth King, and Gareth King.

[Heron]

Yes for those wanting to learn to SPEAK the language as he eschews 'book Welsh' in favour of Welsh in everyday usage.

But less useful if you actually want to read some literature.

[megli]

Hmm, perhaps, though he has a serviceable section on the literary language in his 'Colloquial Welsh'. I learnt Middle Welsh long before modern Welsh so I'm spoiled!

[Blackbird]

I've got Colloquial Welsh too - got started on that, and found it really useful. Not that I've got terribly far... I've learnt enough about pronunciation and meaning to be able to do a few songs and recite a bit of poetry. For me, living in an area where I'm not really going to get the opportunity to use Welsh in conversation, that's good enough for now.

I agree, the BBC site is great, and I've found the newsletter very good too.

[Tegernacus]

there is the 'Learn Welsh Podcast' too. Subscribe in your iTunes or whatever, and get shownotes delivered as well. Start at part 1, obviously. Surprisingly good, with the advantage that you can stuff it on your ipod/phone and listen wherever you go. Run through it a few times, it's easy. Even if it just gets you familiar with the sound of the words, how they flow together... a book can't teach you that.

learnwelshpodcast.blogspot.com/