Cynghorion i Ddysgwyr • Advice for Learners

"Isn't Welsh miserably difficult?"

Welsh has (in my opinion) an entirely undeserved reputation for being a very difficult language to learn. Its initial consonants jump around, it switches its verbs and sentence subjects, and there is some angst over precisely what part of speech a typical verb actually is. Not only that, but the writing is cryptic and the pronunciation of some consonants is so difficult that your tongue will quite literally tie itself in knots trying.

Well, that's the myth. The reality is quite a bit different. The initial consonants of words do shift, but in very predictable -- and more importantly, in completely regular -- ways. Tad is the Welsh word for "father." Ei dad means "his father," but ei thad is "her father" and fy nhad "my father." That one letter /t/ shifts between /d/, /th/, and /nh/. However, when you learn about these consonants shifts -- called mutations -- you realize that they are in fact completely regular and not difficult to understand.

And while Welsh switches its verbs and subjects in some ways, the jury is still out on precisely how engrained that is. In most of the commonly conjugated (long-form) verbs, the inflection comes before the subject, but the verb, strictly speaking, does not. Short-form verbs are another matter, but what seems to be happening is not that the verb starts the sentence, but that the inflection does. In English questions, this also happens. Consider the sentences "Do you want to go to the store?" and "Did you want to go to the store?" The verb to do is meaningless in that sentence, but functions as a sponge to soak up the verb tense, which must "bubble up" to the front of the sentence in English questions -- present tense in the first example, past in the second. The only difference between English and Welsh is that in English, this process only occurs in questions whereas in Welsh, it happens in all sentences.

And the much-feared Welsh "verb-noun" is also nothing unusual in English, where we simply add an -ing ending to a verb to create a noun. "To ride" is a verb; one rides. However, "riding" is a thing, a pasttime. Welsh does the same thing, only leaving off the -ing.

And unlike English, where the -ough at the ends of words like "through," "though," "cough," "bough," and "enough" are pronounced completely differently, the words in Welsh are (for the most part) pronounced precisely as they are spelled. Granted, when one is confronted by a word like "llongyfarchiadau," that might not be terribly reassuring, but if you take it slowly, you will know exactly how the word is pronounced. The voiceless /rh/ and the signature /ll/ of Welsh -- called a lateral fricative and not really that scary at all -- are not hard to get a grip on, any more than the oddball English voiced /th/ that comes in front of words like "this" and "that," and the even stranger and harder to characterize American English /r/ sound, which is found in very few other languages on Earth.

In short, just about everything that is called strange and intimidating in Welsh happens in other languages. We've examined the movement of inflection to the head of the sentence above, but that's not all. Spanish softens consonants in some contexts, where the first and second /d/ in a word like dedo sound completely different. The "stacking" nature of possessive and genitive phrases in Welsh is very similar to Arabic, where "your brother's phone number/the number (of the) phone (of) your brother" in Welsh is written as rhif ffôn eich brawd/number phone your brother. In Arabic a similar construction would be used for a phrase like "the bank manager's name/the name (of) the manager (of) the bank" -- ism el mudir el bank/name the manager the bank. In both cases, the nouns are "stacked" in the reverse order of English, with the linking "of's" knocked out.

Not only that, but the language is breathtakingly regular! All those consonant shifts? When the rules require them, they happen. Without exception. The odd sentence structure? Graven in stone. There are five irregular verbs in Welsh, and four of them are very similar. One, bod or "to be," is used to conjugate just about everything, so you'll memorize it in short order.

So drop your fear of all those enormously long words and mutable consonants. It's really not that bad at all. Speaking as someone who began studying French when I was 10 and was once fluent, and who has since picked up no small amount of Spanish from living in southern California, I can tell you right now: compared to the Romances languages, Welsh is a breeze. And the abundance of resources for the learner make the speaking of it even more of an attainable goal.

Offline Resources for the Welsh Learner

Presumably, you've been reassured that learning Welsh is not the linguistic equivalent of climbing Mount Everest. It's far from useless, and it's not at all impossible.

Where do you go from here, offline?

There are a few books that you must own. They include Y Geiriadur Mawr, "The Great Dictionary." This can be purchased from Amazon.co.uk. This is the ultimate Welsh dictionary, and you will not find a Welsh-speaking household anywhere in the world without one.

The second book you must own is Gareth King's "Basic Welsh: A Grammar and Workbook." If you plan on devoting a more time to learning Welsh in some depth, I would recommend King's larger "Modern Welsh: A Comprehensive Grammar." However, both are worth owning.

And just because I can't stand not including at least one on-line resource, I'll also include the On-Line Welsh Grammar in PDF form at the BBC's Learn Welsh site. It's more basic than King's grammar, but should keep you busy for some time.

Soon, you will be needing other books to practice your reading comprehension. The online news sites that I review in my Gwersau Arlein • Online Lessons and Cymru Heddiw a Ddoe • Wales Yesterday and Today pages are excellent for that, but for those times when you want a fictional novel, you can purchase excellent short novels geared for learners as well as other books in both English and Welsh at GWales.com.

Sut i Ddysgu Ieithoedd yn Gyffredinol -- How to Learn Languages in General

Below, you'll find a number of specific bits of advice for learning languages. However, in order to learn them, and in order to apply these specific rules well, there are a few very general, broad-stroke things you'll want to keep in mind.

Think in abstract terms as well as concrete.: This is the way that small children learn languages and why they are so astonishingly good at it. When a child hears a phrase like "across the bridge," she is aware that this isn't just about the pretty arch of wooden slats over the pond and where the cat ended up when he walked over them. It's about something called a preposition and its object. In fact, it's about any word that takes an object, be it preposition or verb, and where that word goes in relation to its object. If you hear that phrase, you want to say to yourself, "Okay, what sorts of words are these and how are they placed?" That phrase, on the abstract level, is "preposition followed by object." If you keep this in mind, you will also have learned, just by thinking about the structure of that one short phrase, how to make any other prepositional phrase as well as any verb phrase. "Across the bridge," when properly analyzed, will tell you that you should say "likes hamburgers," and "eats ice cream," as well, instead of "ice cream eats" and "hamburgers likes," which some languages do. If a rule seems to apply for one verb, try it out for the next one you have to use and see if it works. Extend your knowledge. Each step in language-learning has to lead to another step, and then another and another, everything building on what went before.
Analyze the living daylights out of everything you get your hands on.: This is where it seriously helps to like thinking in general. I know that sounds silly, but it helps vastly to be the sort of person who prefers sitting and reading or thinking about stuff to most other activities. Every utterance in every language is chock full of information about that language. As in the above example, the word order in a simple phrase can tell you oceans about how to construct phrases you've never heard. The spelling can tell you even more. Think about how the individual words are created -- is "bridge" its own word? In English, for example, words like "stretch" and "seem" have no smaller parts; they can't be divided up into smaller bits of meaning, like the word "untie" can ("un-" meaning "not" followed by "tie"). In Welsh, they have a similar prefix on some words: "ymestyn" and "ymddangos." If you run into a few more words that start with "ym-" you can see that they all have something in common: they have to do with evincing something from inside oneself. "Estyn" is to stretch something like a rubber band. "Ymestyn" is to stretch oneself. "Dangos" is to show something to someone. "Ymddangos" is to show something in oneself, to seem a certain way. When you see that "ym-" in future, maybe you can figure out what it means by yanking it off the front and seeing if you recognize what's left.
Get it in your head any way you can.: Don't worry about buying the "best" book or the "most current" tapes, or finding the "top" online lessons. Do them all. Seriously -- gorge yourself on everything you can get your hands on. Especially if you live, as I do, several time zones away from Wales, you can't afford to be picky. Cram it in your head any way you can, and do it as often as possible. Listen to the radio online, watch S4C digital programming online. Grab a stream capture program and download them. Strip the audio out and listen to it in the car. Read the online news and blogs. Buy books and magazines, attend face-to-face lessons. Get it in your head any way you can.

These general guidelines for language-learning are the zero-order rules for everything else, the starting postulates without which no other progress can be made. You must think in abstract terms, and you must chew every single thing you get apart, gnaw every scrap of meat off the bones and suck the marrow out until it's dry as a desert. It's so much fun!

Language Learning -- A 14-Step Approach

From studying various languages, I've boiled down the basics to the following components. If you concentrate on the following things, and in the following structure, you should have a good road map for learning any language and not simply Welsh.

Before I get into that though, I'd like to highlight one of the most important aspects of learning any language, which often goes right over the heads of most students. It's almost foolish in its simplicity. Listen to native speakers. Get out and among them, as early and as often as possible. Do not allow your instructor's voice to be the only one you hear speaking Welsh. Individuals have their own way of speaking and their own intonation and rhythm, well above and beyond the dialect spoken in their area. If you only hear one person speaking, you may be able to understand them perfectly and yet be completely at a loss the first time you hear someone else. Anyone who has learned a language in a classroom and gone out into the world at large to use it has experienced this, sometimes painfully. Get out among native speakers. Listen to S4C online. Download Welsh podcasts (podlediadau -- a great word to put into Google). Get as many voices as possible in your ears. Get used to the sounds of many speakers' voices, their particular dialect, and even their own individual mannerisms and ways of speaking. The difference it will make will amaze you.

That said, let's approach the basic structure of language learning. All language learning can be broken down into the following components:

Learn the words for body parts, family and friends, clothing, food, greetings, and common objects like table settings, books, automobiles, and such. These are the words that you will be using most often, and that will not change. They are the most immutable words in any language and an excellent starting point.
Learn how to pluralize. I almost feel bad including this in a page about Welsh, because the language uses a positive game preserve of suffixes to mark plurals. Ysgol/ysgolion, heddlu/heddluoedd, coleg/colegau, coeden/coed, ffilm/ffilmiau, cath/cathod. Makes one long for the simplicity of the -s and -es used in English. However, learning how to say that there is more than one of something is crucial.
Learn the basic verb tenses and conjugations. Present, pasts of various flavors, future, conditional, ought/should, must. Learn how to negate them. This is much easier said than done, or in Welsh, "Haws dweud na gwneud." Dealing with verbs and vocabulary is routinely the most time-consuming part of learning any language. But these basics must be treated as a group and approached together. Often, similarities between various forms of the verbs will pop out at you, making one tense or mood easier to pick up once you know others.
Learn how to turn something into a question. Learn yes and no. This can get more complicated than you think for some languages, one of which is Welsh, in which there is no set word for "yes" or "no." One answers the question, "Will it rain tomorrow?" with "It will" or "It won't," and not "yes" or "no."
Learn the prepositions. These words relate things to one another in time and space. Above/below. In front/behind. Before/after. In/out. Some of these in Welsh change depending on the pronoun that follows them, but this is not uncommon. In Italian, the pronoun "in" can take about seventeen dozen forms, if I recall correctly. (Okay, I'm exaggerating. A little.)
Learn how to handle direct and indirect objects, where they fall in the sentence, how/if they affect the verbs they associate with. (Related: Learn how the language marks case, if applicable.) This can be more complex in some languages, as in French where the past participle of a verb agrees with the object in number and gender if said object precedes the verb. In other situations, the French past participle agrees with the subject if the past tense is conjugated with "to be" as opposed to the more common "to have." Welsh uses what are in effect possessive pronouns to mark the objects of verbs, and since those pronouns cause consonants mutations, the verbs undergo these mutations as well.
Learn how to nest sentences: "I know John," versus "I know that John likes Mary." This is a huge step, since with it, language becomes recursive and as infinite as it's meant to be. The infinitely nesting nature of language is a fundamental quality of language itself. This can also be more complex than one would imagine at first glance. The following phrases are all nesting phrases: "I decided that I liked it." "I decided that he wouldn't like it." "Sweaters that are knitted." "People who knit." "I wonder how she made that sweater." "I wonder why she made that sweater." "I can't see who is standing there."
Learn some basic word pairs like hungry/thirsty, true/false, tall/short, good/bad. Word pairs are always useful. Often, you can cover up not knowing one by negating the other. If you can't remember how to say that something is difficult, simply say that it's not easy.
Learn how to say something is more than, less than, and as blah-blah as something else. Learn how to compare things. Vital, in any language.
Learn certain catchphrases, like, "Of course." "Certainly." "Right?" "Really!" "Excellent!" "Too bad!" These are the lubricant of any conversation, and the sort of things that you will want to say easily and with emotional emphasis. Along with them, you should learn some basic idiomatic expressions (expressions that don't quite mean what their words mean). These include things like, "Give me a break!" "No way!" "Awesome!" You may know the Welsh word used to describe something that evokes a sense of awe ("an awesome sight"), but is that the same word you would use when you see a DVD player with all the bells and whistles for sale for half-off of an already discounted price ("an awesome deal")?
Learn the question words: how, who, what, why, when, where. These words can also change depending on where they occur in a sentence, as they do in Welsh. The question word for "when?" which is used at the head of a question is "Pryd?" Ex.: Pryd symudaist ti i Gymru?/When did you move to Wales? The answer would be, Fe symudais i i Gymru pan o'n i'n ifanc/I moved to Wales when I was young. In the first sentence, "when" is pryd, and in the second pan.
Learn how to handle "if" statements. Learn how to handle hypotheticals.
Learn time words: today, tomorrow, tonight, last week, next year.
Learn to count years and tell time. Learn numbers. Again, this can be complex in some cases. In French, the words for "72" and "97" translate directly to "sixty-twelve" and "four-score and seventeen." In Welsh, if you use the traditional ways of counting -- by twenties -- "72" is "twelve on three twenties." Happily, there is a modern way of counting that simply translates as "seven ten two." In some contexts however -- telling time and counting money less than twenty units -- the traditional method counting is a must.

With these basics, you should be able to get around. Now, I've called these "basic," but of course this is the work of months or years. however, this general structure and approach to learning a language should do you well.