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dw i'n sharad sasneg pob math o amser ond yn y tgiu dw i'n cle A yn cumrig a C yn sasneg. (i speek english most of the time but im getting A in wellsh GCSE and C in english.) achos dwin hoffi sharad a ysgriffeny cumrig moro i sasneg. (because i like speeking and writing welsh more than english.)

Hi

Meet our other Welsh learners on the Welsh Education board at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbwalesedu/F2130353

A member of the Welsh board has a question; he's just started to learn Welsh and was wondering if there are any bilingual (Welsh/English) novels on the market and where to purchase them.

If any members can help him with this question please post a response to him here: F2130353?thread=651484

Thanks!

Today I quite like going to France and trying out my French.

At school I thought it was a bloody drag, simply because the teaching, in method and delivery, was so woefully uninspired and wooden and seemed to have nothing at all to do with conveying a vibrant spoken language.

It did, however, have everything to do with the inflexibility of a system that insisted every last little agreement for gender and plurality should be absolutely right and valued the grammatical structure more than it did your ability to speak the language - we were expected to use the language as well as, or better than, French kids our own age who we were sure wouldn't be marked as strictly for grammatical errors.

This left me with a distaste for the language that took a long time to shake off.

If Welsh is taught in the same chronically underinspired over-pedantic way, I can see kids switching off - nothing to do with the language, everything to do with the teaching method!

(I came to the language later, post-school)

Also discovered - once in Europe rather than in a classroom in GB - that French, German, et c, are spoken in the REAL world in a way that several years of dire classroom teaching had utterly failed to prepare me for.

I was amused by the earlier posting in Welsh that showed that a native speaker can have tons of spelling mistakes and other formal errors in their use of the language, yet can still manage to convey their meaning simply and clearly.

This is an aspect of PRACTICAL, everyday, use of language that my school at least was utterly incapable of appreciating. We were striving for perfection to a standard that a native speaker would boggle at, and this was strangling any form of spontanaiety in the way we used it - the idea that a language is a means of communicating, not some drab academic exercise in getting gender, case and plurality correspondences correct, got lost by the wayside somewhere.

I did notice in Germany that the whole business of masculine-feminine-neuter, the der-die-das thing, which in school had been stressed as utterly and indispensibly important, didn't matter much on the ground; in spoken German, the three definite articles all sort of slurred into one unisex "de" noise.

And then there are regional accents and dialects: France and Germany have a lot of them. You only need to go to the Languedoc, where French starts to shade into Catalan Spanish, to realise that most of what you were taught in school was suddenly irrelevant. (You end up winging it on the ground, so to speak)

I'm au fait enough to know that Welsh as spoken in Caernarfon has a different intonation and flavour to Welsh as spoken in Flintshire; this isn't insurmountable, as I remember being in a pub in Caernarfon with Bill The Sheep-Farmer From Gwernymynydd, who was talking things ovine with counterparts from the foothills of Snowdonia. A bit of goodwill and a few minutes to adjust to each other's rhythms and local peculiarities, and a shared (professional) interest in sheep did the rest!

But langugage teaching in schools - I REALLY hope it's improved, but I fear it hasn't.

....*im laughing my head off in this conversation,so i just thought id add a little to it*....
Also to make this clear i am not putting an argument forward or supporting someone elses im just stating my feelings on the subject of learning another language.
i live in australia and being 14 and in a private only girls school (its not as bitchy as it sounds)i have had many a language forced apon me...mandarin, japanese, french, italian and spanish....i diddent mind the experiance although i did not like the french teacher. it was (is)fun to learn another language it does not take so long...just buy a $15 set of those language tapes and youl be set in about a month or so of hard work. Do you U.K dwellers have them? really handy they are,especialy in the land down under where practically everyone has a different background.
So i guess im kinda supporting the argument of learning Welsh...especialy if you live in wales.

Hannah...the girl who has no idea why she is replying to the bloomimg topic..

P.S actually im a little bit of a hypacrite (scuze the spelling)Australians dont commonly learn there native tongue (aboriginal)
even if their origins arnt anglo-saxin....sad really.

P.P.S did you all like the melbourne commonwelth games...thats my city...yippeeee.On second thoughts did you actually get it shown over there..oh well byeeee for noww.