Where do I start with Welsh?

 "Where are we staying in Wales this summer?" asked my husband, wanting to make absolutely sure we chose the best possible accommodations with the best view, the best breakfast, at the best price.

"I researched a couple of towns on the North Coast, but I can't remember the names.  I can't even pronounce them!"  I complained.

That was the start of my desire to study the Welsh language.  I'm a language teacher.  I speak three languages and have studied a few more.  Surely, I told myself,  I could learn at least enough Welsh in the next year to be able to tell someone where we will be staying.  So I started devising a Welsh self-study  plan.  My goal was to teach myself, following the same philosophy I use in teaching Portuguese and Spanish in the college classroom.

Step One in acquiring a language is understanding the language.  Where could I hear and comprehend spoken Welsh?  I googled 'Welsh Language Study' and found quite a few sources.  It would have been great to enroll in an online course, but the perennial considerations, time and money, kept me from going that route. Did I really want to jump into Welsh grammar?  I almost fell into that trap.  Maybe I could order a nice grammar workbook where I could fill in the blanks with the correct form.   I teach linguistics courses and actually enjoy grammar.   But I knew that a heavy dose of grammar, though it might be intriguing to me personally, would not really be helpful until I had acquired enough Welsh language to apply it to.

What did appeal to me were websites that appeared to be more elementary.  Quick and dirty was what I wanted at this stage.  So I finally chose a site that described the Welsh alphabet.   Welsh has 28 letters, some of them double letters (dd, ff,ll), and some two letters combined (ch, ph, rh, th, ng), Also, the Welsh alphabet does not contain the following letters:  j, k, q, v, x, z.  Okay, interesting enough, but I still didn't know how to pronounce a word.  No wonder I don't teach the alphabet in foreign language courses, even though some students have complained that they would like to learn it.

Back I went to Google.  This time I found a site for Welsh pronunciation.  Oh, my, so many IPA symbols.  Some I knew from English phonetics, but did I really want to wade through the transcription of 14 diphthongs?  Certainly not.  When I read that three of the diphthongs have the same IPA pronunciation [eye], I decided just to fake the vowel combinations.  Vowels don't have that much sound compared to consonants, anyway.  This approach wasn't getting me very far.

Then I remembered an old Rosetta Stone CD forgotten in my desk drawer for many years. It was so old that it wouldn't work on my new laptop.  I found a former laptop stored up on an office shelf, dusted it off and booted it up.  It read the CD!   Yes, Welsh was on the list!  I was off on my language learning adventure!

Six months later, that same computer with the CD still inserted still sat by my reading chair.  I had not touched it since the day I set it up.  What had gotten in the way of my Welsh self-study plan?  Life.  And also wanting to do things too perfectly.  Obsessive-compulsive personalities do not make the best language acquirers.

The summer trip was looming in six months, and I still didn't know how to pronounce 'Llandudno' , the name of the Welsh coastal resort where we would be spending a few days before attending the London Summer Olympic Games.  I did some quick Internet research and found out that the double ll in Llandudno has a  sound that is difficult for English speakers.  The suggestion was to say the word 'whistle' with a lisp.  The sound in the second syllable of 'whistle' would approximate the ll sound.  So now my husband and I try to say 'Llandudno' correctly, looking pretty strange as we get our teeth and tongue in unusual positions to pronounce the beginning sound of the word.

At least I had made a start with the Welsh language.  Several weeks ago, I plugged earphones into the old laptop and listened to Level 1, Unit 1, Lesson 1 of Rosetta Stone.  I had used  Rosetta Stone  in the past to practice Portuguese and Spanish, but I had never used it to start a completely new language.  What were those people saying in Welsh, and why were they talking so fast?  What if I couldn't match the picture with the meaning of the word?  And it wasn't just words.  There were phrases as well.  What word in the phrase meant what?  I played the same lesson over quite a few times in different modalities, sometimes just listening to Welsh, other times listening and reading, sometimes just reading (the easiest!), and even doing some elementary writing.  I loved it when I got the smiley face and a pleasant chime sound for a correct answer, but I sometimes cursed under my breath when I received the X and an unpleasant sound for an incorrect answer.

Lesson 1 was now getting a bit boring.  I didn't know absolutely everything in it, but it was time to make myself move on to Lesson 2.  Now I'm up to Lesson 3.  The units follow a predictable sequence.  First I have to learn new material.  About 20 minutes of that is all that my brain can absorb.  For the next session, I review quickly and then practice with different types of exercises.  Each practice gets a bit easier, although sometimes my brain turns off completely or my attention wanders, and I miss the cue.  Maybe eventually I can learn a few choice words in Welsh to express my displeasure when I get the thumbs down signal.

I know that part of successful language acquisition is developing a 'tolerance for ambiguity'.   This was certainly true for Welsh.  For example, I was delighted to learn the word for 'cat' in Welsh, 'cath'.  Now I have a new name to call our pet Bitsy.  But wait, just when I had learned 'cath', I heard the speaker on the CD talk about the 'gath'.   I began to notice that other words were changing the beginning sound as well.  The phonological rule causing the sound change is still a mystery to me. Maybe I should reconsider ordering that Welsh grammar workbook.

The topic of Lesson 3 was the numbers 0-10.  Really now.  How hard is it to learn eleven numbers ?  I found out very soon just how hard it is.  Numbers are one of those concepts that a person learns once in their native language, I believe, and the numbers in subsequent acquired languages just never have the same deep meaning.  I still can't count from 0-10 in Welsh, but I can recognize the numbers when I hear them, which I suppose is the real use of numbers.  I don't get many requests to count aloud in any language.

After three lessons of Rosetta Stone study, I can now imagine myself on the boardwalk in Llandudno, holding fascinating conversations with Welsh speakers.  I can observe that the girls are walking, the horse is jumping, the airplane is flying, the boy is falling down, or, if we should see a fish, that the fish is swimming.  I can also indicate that I want not one but two scones at the takeaway coffee shop by the beach.  Who knows what friendships may be formed in Wales because I wanted to know how to pronounce 'Llandudno'?