I have now done over 20 of the SSIW introductory courses and am on track to complete the full course by the end of May. I thought it was time I gave you some feed back.

I am 66, with the advantage of a wonderful wife whose first language is Welsh and who is encouraging and helping me enormously with my Welsh.

My previous experience of learning languages was painful and grim. 10 years of Latin and French at school ill equipping me to speak any French, when I got to France at 17. My Spanish experience has been somewhat better thanks to Michel Thomas’s CDs.

I attended two one-week courses at Nant Gwrtheyrn in February, which I found a good start and a friend recommended SSIW to me on the completion of these courses.

Your system of “Listen & Talk” is absolutely first class. Learning a language is like digital photography; it’s easy to take the pictures but getting them out of the camera is altogether another problem. The SSIW system means that one is forced to speak right from the start. What you learn is immediately converted to speech instead of being locked in the brain, as so much unusable vocabulary and grammar.

We all, after all, learned our first language this way “listening and then talking”.

I have down-loaded all the courses onto an I Pod and find this method works well for me. Down-loading, of course, means that you get little feed back of how many people are actually learning from your web site, as one down load is all the traffic you see.

Can I express my appreciation to you both and your volunteers for SSIW and for all the work and effort that you have so clearly put into the courses and site?

I have a son who operates a web site and I know how time consuming the programming can be.

Yours is a noble and altruistic endeavour, which you should be truly proud of. I understand that in all its time about 8,000 Welsh language students have passed through the courses at Nant Gwrtheyrn, it looks as though SSIW has already overtaken them. Quite an achievement for you and I mean no criticism of The Nant in this.

I look forward to moving on to your next course and am setting up a standing order.

Learning a language can never be effortless but SSIW makes it painless.

Yours sincerely

Hugo D Page Croft, Biwmares