I’ve been learning Welsh on and off for years. I’ve made slow progress and am stuck at beginner level. Recently, I decided to stop following courses and instead focus on enjoying multimedia entertainment in Welsh. I hope this will give me the chance to acquire words and grammatical structures in a more natural and intuitive way. Here are some things I’ve been trying out.

Practise Welsh listening with folk songs

Gwilym Bowen Rhys is a Welsh folk singer with a beautiful voice. I’m a big fan and often listen to his songs on YouTube – even though I understand very little of them.

Over the weekend, it occurred to me to look the lyrics up online. I’m glad that I did. They’re on Bowen Rhys’s website in Welsh and English. I found them in the dropdown menu under the word “geiriau,” which means “words.”

I chose two songs on YouTube and listened to them over and over again while reading the lyrics. They were:

Coed Glyn Cynon (lyrics to Coed Glyn Cynon at this link)

Yr Wylan Gefnddu (lyrics to Yr Wylan Gefnddu at this link)

Welsh and English have very different sentence structures. They’re also from different language families. That means it’s usually not possible to match the Welsh word with the English one just by sight. I used Google Translate to check the meaning of each word.

I intend to stick with these two songs until I know their words and phrases well enough to recognise them in other contexts. I expect it’ll take a long time, but as it also means listening to Gwilym Bowen Rhys sing, it’s no hardship at all.

Practise Welsh listening with a teen drama

I’ve also been practising my listening skills by watching Y Coridor on S4C. It’s available with English and Welsh subtitles on S4C’s app. You can also find it with only English subtitles on the BBC iPlayer.

Each episode is about 10 minutes long. I watch it with English subtitles, and then I repeat it immediately afterwards with Welsh subtitles.

It’s an engaging teen drama about a schoolgirl who goes missing. I think the language is quite accessible. I usually feel a lot more confident about my Welsh after watching it.

Pulling out of a rut

I’m sure that following courses is the best way to learn Welsh. It’s a difficult language for English speakers because it is so different.

I’ve switched to using Welsh rather than studying Welsh because I felt stuck in a rut. Some beginner lessons were too easy for me, but I didn’t know the language well enough to progress to the next level.

I’m going to measure my progress by how much I rely on subtitles. If one day I can watch Y Coridor without any subtitles at all, I’ll be very pleased with myself.