“Incredible”, I thought; “I have to download the rest of the course!”. Now I am in lesson 14 and although I do not know any Welsh speaker in Hungary, I can speak, think and even dream in Welsh. In one word, Say Something in Welsh is just a MIRACLE.

Carles Fernandez, Hódmezővásárhely, Hungary

Love the course, and put at least 3 welsh learners onto it, who say they’ve learned more about how to use the language in the first 6 lessons than they have in all their previous courses. In fact my mother in law has been learning for 28 years off and on (she’s from Wiltshire), and she can’t work out why I can speak more welsh than her! (will tell her about SSIW- all in good time…)

I particularly like the almost laughing session.. Anyone else noticed it? Can’t remember which one it is now. It’s around 5/6. Had you been drinking??

Diolch!

Christian Sefton, Pontypool

I have been learning Welsh for 5 years in evening classes before discovering this course and was starting to feel demoralised by my lack of progress. I stumbled upon this site by accident just before Christmas and whilst I haven’t posted much on here I have been slowly working through the lessons to the point that I have today completed lesson 14 of the intermediate course. I have to say that I have enjoyed every minute but more importantly my Welsh has improved beyond recognition. I now geniuinely feel that I can speak Welsh and I have no doubt that the work on this couse in recent months has taken me there.

I still attend my evening classes but my tutor now says I don’t need to- he says ‘ti ar y bont, mae rhaid I ti siarad Cymraeg bod dydd nawr’ so I try! My girlfriend is from Blaenau Ffestiniog originally and until recently she would only speak to me in English but now she always uses Welsh with me first – such an amazing shift for her as she really used to say how hard it was to speak Welsh to me. We’ve done so much in Welsh in recent months – we’ve been to Welsh language plays, we’ve been dancing at gwyl ifanc and had Welsh speaking evenings with her friends.

For me the biggest moment came at the Glastonbury festival last month (random I know!). I have been for years and I always meet up with a group of friends from Camarthenshire. Over the years I have tried to practice my Welsh with them but they always answered in English. In the past I would be relieved as I really didn’t have much confidence in things beyond initial greetings. Well this time I kept on and kept on using Welsh, even when they kept answering in English. Well low and behold on the second day they all responded in Welsh. I couldn’t beleive it! I could even understand the majority of what they were saying and could continue the conversation. By the end of the weekend we only used Welsh and I just felt so pleased. On the last day my friend said to me that my Welsh has improved so much since last year that I was now more fluent than them! He said he now started to feel a bit intimidated because I spoke ‘proper Welsh’!

I do feel like I have come on so far. I don’t understand everything all the time (especially when we go up to Ffestiniog) but I keep at it and recognise that language is something you never stop learning and I’m comfortable not understanding everything.

I’m looking forward to the eisteddfod next month to use my Welsh closer to home (fi’n dod o Gasnewydd) and I’ll be looking to say hi to all those on the SSIW stall in Y Maes D.

Thanks

Antony Evans, Newport

I always thought I didn’t have the time to learn Welsh until someone told me about SSiW. That was on St David’s Day this year. Now I am hapus iawn with my progress and have said more Welsh in the last 3 months than in the rest of my entire life. I am firing up my inner Welsh-ness with every lesson; thanks to Iestyn I think I’m developing a fantastic Valleys accent too (my grandmother would have been so proud).

I had always considered myself as one of those people who isn’t very good at learning languages and had always envied those who did. For this reason I put off learning Welsh as I assumed it would take ages and masses of effort. How wrong I was! Learning with SSiW has been easy and fun – no writing and any mistakes are forgotten as soon as the next phrase comes out of my headphones!

I’ve watched my children learning to speak English and this is exactly how they learn, they copy someone else as best they can and don’t get put off if it doesn’t come out quite right. They don’t expect to get it all right the first time, so neither do I now; having given myself permission to get it wrong has surprisingly made it so much easier to get it right!

Thanks to SSiW for this amazing course,

Sarah Hedley, Surrey

But these lessons are wonderful, both entertaining and educational. I’ve even downloaded the lessons to my mp3 player and play them in the car when I’m driving to and from University during the week. Definitely two of the best things about this course.

Rebekah Young, Ipswich, Australia

Gwnes i weld e, gwnes i hoffi fe, gwnes i siarad e!

Yesterday I did lesson 3 and I’ve just finished lesson 4. I think it’s going swell, so much so that I can’t believe it. I’ve never learned a language this fast before, and all from just 4 audio lessons. No books, no classroom, just two VERY helpful speakers, an ipod and an hour and a half. It really works!!

Colm Doyle, Tallinn, Estonia

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

I just checked my web history, and the first time I ever visited this site was on Saturday 3rd April (at 21:59, to be precise )

Since then, I’ve done 8 lessons and am about halfway into my 9th (I don’t generally stop in the middle of lessons, but I got a phone call and then got sidetracked into coming onto the forum) – and boy, am I impressed with the effectiveness of these lessons!!

About a year ago I thought ‘I know, I’ll learn Welsh’ (as you do), so I went online and tried to find some resources. I had a poke around the BBC website but found it overcomplicated – it’s split into many different sections with God-knows-how-many games and activities – which is all very well, but I wanted to learn! I found some other site, I’m not sure which one, but it had no pronunciation whatsoever – and I was faces with tables of pronouns, memorising genders, and mutations in lesson 1. So I was kind of put off.

Anyway, I decided a couple of weeks ago (one week and a day, by the looks of it) that I did indeed want to learn Welsh. It could have been because Swansea University is one of the universities that I plan to apply to (it has an excellent languages department), but more likely because I just felt like learning it for fun

I typed ‘Learn Welsh’ into Google, and this was the 4th site on the list – so I clicked on it, signed up, downloaded lesson 1 and was hooked from then on. It took me some time to choose what version to do – Northern or Southern – Swansea is in the south, but there are more speakers in the north – I mentally flipped a coin and decided that I may as well learn the version which has more easy to find speakers, so I chose northern Welsh.

8 days ago, I think I knew the word ‘Cymraeg’ – now I can interrogate people at length about the age of their cats, buy beer, get quite moody if people try to speak to me in English and buy dog meat – the course seriously couldn’t be better! You’ve got it just right: it’s not too grammar / vocab intensive, but you don’t just memorise phrases either. It’s not unlike the Michel Thomas method, but way more interactive and effective.

Diolch yn fawr!!!

Caspian Merlin, South Molton, Devon

I think you guys have really hit on something with this teaching method, I was worried that after lesson 6 things were going to get progressively more difficult, how pleasant to find that so far (I’m on lesson 17) number 6 was the most difficult.

It difficult to get across the enjoyment I’m getting out of this course, but I walk home excitedly looking forward to starting the next lesson.

Ian Blandford, Manchester

Yesterday, I tried the first lesson of the course and I can only say: WOW. This is MUCH more fun and effective than any textual explanations.

Now I always listen to it on my way to school and back, while I’m on my bike.

Thank you very much for making this course: you can be assured that I will recommend it to anyone who wants to learn Welsh!

Deniz Tahtakin, Wildeshausen, Germany

It’s also very good for bringing alive the stuff which you’ve done in formal classes, for revising and consolidating what you already ‘know’ but can’t necessarily say at a moment’s notice. Cuts out all that hesitation as you formulate what you’re saying, because with SaySomethinginWelsh you’ve already said it, and said it confidently.

This course has given me much more confidence in speaking – I don’t feel so ‘apologetic’ about what I’m saying, and this I think makes me easier to understand. And because I sound as though I’m confident about what I’m saying, people are more ready to answer in Welsh rather than switching over to English straight away. People can obviously see that I’m just a learner, but the confidence which arises from speaking with the course makes me sound as though I mean business. Because the course is a spoken course, not a ‘grammar’ course, you end up speaking confidently and people respond to that. As a result, I find I’m using Welsh much more often, in situations where I might have chickened out before. So, more real-life practice, more learning from native-speakers in authentic (real!) situations – in the DIY woodyard, at the cinema, with other passengers on the bus, in the slate museum, etc, etc.

We’re all different, so it’s hard to give anyone else ‘advice’, but I think this course will be good for anyone who wants to use the language in real life, not just as some kind of language exercise or game to be played with other learners or to show some kind of token interest in things Welsh. And I think it ENABLES you to speak Welsh like no other course. It’s extremely practical.

Dave Morgan, Edern

Give it a go. It’s easy!

Martin Davies, London

The length of the classes were perfectly timed, enough new material was introduced to ensure each session was a challenge. The balance of the material also ensured that I was not overloaded with information either. If there were times I had to revisit material, it would be sections of a couple of minutes rather than the whole lesson, therefore I always felt as though I was making good progress. The presenter was encouraging throughout and the relaxed atmosphere to each lesson made the process very enjoyable and stress-free.

I have attended several traditional Welsh courses and the main difference I have found with this course is the speed at which new words and phrases are absorbed. Additionally being able to do the course in my own time is a massive advantage, as like many people I have struggled to find time to progess my Welsh through traditional lessons, it has also enabled me to progress at my own pace.

I would recommend the course to anyone either beginner or intermediate. If you have tried to learn Welsh in the past but are at that point where you feel you’re not progressing, this is the course for you. I have also recommended the course to friends who have had little experience with the language previously and they have also found an immediate connection and understanding through this way of teaching, and even more importantly they now have the confidence to start using Cymraeg after only a few lessons! I also now feel a lot more confident in using my Welsh and am looking forward to the next stages of this course.

Carrie Harper, Wrecsam

I’m currently working through a few comprehensive Welsh coursebooks in the hope of attaining fluency in Welsh by the 2011 Census and am taking part in an event organised on facebook called “THE GREAT, PRE-2011-CENSUS, CHARITY WELSH-ATHON CHALLENGE!” http://www.facebook.com/posted.php?id=32929656908&success#/group.php?gid=32929656908

Despite reading through these textbooks for between 30 mins-1hr + each day, your course has had me ‘thinking in Welsh’ far better after just the first couple of lessons than any of the books I’ve been reading had achieved.

Ceri Young, South Wales

Chris Swift, Neath

Marjorie Bushnell, Washington State, USA

I would just like to say once again thanks to you guys for giving us all this great opportunity!

Emma Martin, Caerffili

Al Evans, Maesycwmmer, nr Caerffili

Junko Salmon, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, USA

1) I love the way each lesson “loops back around” to review words and phrases, and also to repeat sentence patterns.

2) Thank you for clear pronunciation, and for going slowly enough!

3) Thanks also for the praise, reassurance, and encouragement along the way.

Theresa Clark, Seattle, USA

As the lessons are aimed at complete beginners, I expected to not gain anything at all from them. However, after listening to the first lesson, it was clear that was not the case. Even though it uses vocabulary and patterns that I am already familiar with, it forced me to use them in different ways, to experiment with them, to say them and use them again and again, so I’m now able to talk completely fluently about those subjects!

All in all, I really think this is a breakthrough in learning Welsh, or indeed learning any language. I’ll be recommending it to anyone who is learning or wants to learn Welsh.

Christina Land, Bournemouth

Diolch yn fawr iawn! Dw i wrth fy modd!

Dee McCarney, Cardiff

Olga Bezrodnaya, Kherson, Ukraine

After over a year struggling through various BBC on-line courses I was feeling like giving up as my progress (in spoken Welsh) was painfully slow.

Thanks again to Aran, Catrin, Iestyn and Cat for all the effort they have put in.

John Brock, Wrecsam

Phil Evans, Aberystwyth

I’ve been trying to learn Welsh for years, alas I’m one of those people who just have no affinity for any other languages, no matter how much I try. However, after the first lesson, I was able to make phrases and understand them. Ok, I had to stop the first lesson halfway through and start again, but seriously, just in that time I was more confident in my speech.

James Walls, London

Janet Aldridge, Flint

Lis Powell-Rees, Houston, Texas

Thanks a heck of a lot, and I can’t tell you how generous I think you are to do this. Rosetta Stone would have cost me hundreds of dollars and probably been less effective. Thank GOD for you guys!

Dan Rhys, Santa Clarita, California

I’d just about given up hope, as I was finding it really hard, but at the weekend, whilst the wife was revising for her exams; I was scouring the internet, and stumbled across you guys via the forum on the BBC/learnwelsh site! I’m already on to lesson 2, and have learnt more Welsh in the last few days, than I had in the previous 9 months!!! I’ve downloaded the lessons on to my mp3 player, and listen to them whilst on my round! This course has given me renewed interest in the language, just when all hope seemed lost! Thank you very much for all of your hard work, and I will let you know how I fare!!

Garry Goodall, Cardiff

Cath Clarke, Helsby, Cheshire

Jean Hollis

John Larson, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA

Stephanie Quesnel, Chicopee, Massachussetts, USA

Noel Powell, Llanelli

Kris Das, London

Edward Evans, Prescot, Lancashire