Actually I'm annoyed with myself.

And I'm annoyed with the people of Pembrokeshire! We went for a family holiday for a week to Pembrokeshire (beautiful, by the way) and I managed to speak almost no Welsh. The problem was mostly that I encountered virtually no one who spoke Welsh! Or at least no one who advertised the fact if they did.

I say "almost no Welsh" because I listed the items in my shopping basket in Welsh to my step-daughter, and I replied with "Dw i'n siarad tipyn bach Cymraeg, hefyd" when confronted with the reply of "tipyn bach" to my question of "Do you speak Welsh?" to a shopkeeper.

And that was it. I overheard someone at Castell Henllys speaking Welsh, but they'd gone by the time the demonstration I was watching had finished, otherwise I might have asked to practice a little with them (although God knows what I'd have said).

It's a shame, really. An opportunity missed. My Welsh comprehension is now getting beyond the Mynediad (entry) level, but my listening and speaking have had very little practice.

Still, I was at least surrounded by written Welsh: road signs, shop signs, leaflets, and I took the time to watch a little S4C, so all was not lost.

This is something I've started feeling quite strongly about lately, although I admit I'm partial to a bit of bias given my current enthusiasm for Cymraeg, but...

...why don't we teach Welsh as a second language in England? I say England because in Scotland and Northern Ireland they already have native languages that should be taught, but England does not.

I know some people will think, "Are you mad?!" but hear me out; my reasoning is sound:

1. Many children are more likely to visit Wales than Germany. German is taught in many British schools, yet British tourists to Germany number around 2 million per year compared to 10 million in Wales (2015 figure). This means more chance to practice a language learnt in school.

2. Welsh is the language of these islands. English people may not appreciate this, but our ancestors spoke something similar to Welsh. Before the Romans, Saxons and then Normans invaded, the native languages of these islands were the Brythonic languages, of these Welsh is the one currently in the healthiest state. Learning Welsh is a link to our past, even as Englishmen.

3. Learning any language has benefits beyond just that language. Learning one language helps a child understand other languages and their own language much better. There is nothing to be lost by learning Welsh and much to be gained.

4. Welsh is different. Welsh is not like French, German or Spanish; the languages children usually learn in school. The structure is different and it borrows little from Romance or Germanic languages. Learning Welsh gives children a different perspective on language learning yet remains relevant as it's spoken as a living language by 700,000 people and is an official language of the UK, unlike Cantonese, Mandarin or Satsuma ;)

5. Welsh is easy. Well, sort of. As I've covered previously, simple Welsh sentences in the past, present and future tenses can involve very little conjugation beyond the verb "bod" (to be). This makes progress fast and enthuses children to learn. Why spend two years mastering present tense conjugations in French when you can learn the same sentences in Welsh in a fraction of the time?

Not everyone will agree with me. I know the counter argument will be "but more people speak language X than speak Welsh!" or the usual "Welsh is a dead language! What's the point?!". But Welsh is growing. By teaching it as a second language it will grow more and these questions will answer themselves.

My last post was about starting the Say Something In Welsh course. This is just an update on how that's going.

First, the main difference between this and DuoLingo is the sense of community. The DuoLingo forums (if you can call them that) are really only for people asking questions about the lessons themselves, or querying the correct answers to questions within the lessons. The Say Something In Welsh forums have much more spirit about them. People joke with each other, people ask questions, get replies and then go off topic about their experiences of learning Welsh. People share their real world experiences of *using* Welsh and receive encouragement from others for doing so. And, most importantly, the course creators and contributors also join in with all of this. And there's never a hint of condescension, just encouragement. This tone is maintained through the lessons themselves, with one of the later sentences on the very first lesson being "I'm not trying to speak Welsh, I am speaking Welsh" (Dw i ddim yn trio siarad Cymraeg, dw i'n siarad Cymraeg!)

Second, the course takes some getting used to for someone like me who has done a little Welsh before. The pronunciations are a little more colloquial, and words are omitted in the same way that a native speaker might: "Wyt ti'n bwyta" (you are eating) becomes simply "ti'n bwyta", in much the same way as an English speaker might ask simply "You eating?"

Then there's the manner of the course. Everything is very relaxed. You're told "don't worry about this now" when introduced to things like mutations and the long form of the past tense. You're told, "To form the past tense, you only need to know how to say "ness ee". This stumped me, until I realised it was just a colloquial pronunciation of what I know as "Mi wnes i". I'm not sure how well I cope with this casual approach. I **need** to know conjugations, I **need** to know why things are what they are. It's very hard for me to just let go and accept that things are as they are, and it will all become clear later.

But I'm trying. The course clearly works, as plenty of people on the forums are using it, and Iestyn is an excellent teacher. His lessons are well measured, his voice is clear, he's encouraging throughout, and he participates in the forums to answer questions and give advice.

He is clearly passionate about Welsh, and that enthusiasm is infectious.

I originally signed up to the SaySomethingInWelsh forums a few weeks ago when I found it quite by accident while searching for information on the use of "sydd" vs "pwy", and my use of the site didn't go beyond reading some of the forum posts.

Today I decided to start their lessons. Learning with SaySomethingInWelsh is quite unlike DuoLingo. The latter presents you with very short lessons based around short sentences you translate into English, write out in Welsh, or match to pictures. Because of its visual nature, learning the written forms of words is essential to the learning process.

SaySomethingInWelsh is quite different. They actively discourage note taking and base their lessons entirely on listening and repeating the material in a fashion a little similar to a Teach Yourself CD. The idea is that you learn by doing.

Despite having worked up to Level 16 on DuoLingo, I decided to start right at the beginning with the SaySomething course, just in case it offered vocabulary I had not come across on DuoLingo, and so that I got the most out of the course.

So far I'm liking it. It's ideal for having in the car while driving, as one might an audio CD. The only disconcerting thing at the moment is the pronunciation of the speaker, who is a native speaker from the South East. I'm familiar with pronouncing words with "ae" to sound as "eye", whereas he pronounces them more like "ah". Thus "cymraeg" to me sounds like "cum-rye-g" but to him is more "cum-raag". I'm not going to argue with him; he's a native speaker, after all, but it takes some getting used to. I can only assume my pronunciation is either more "standard" or more northern.

Even lesson one brought about some new-ish vocabulary for me, so it's looking like a promising new route for learning, with the added bonus of some forums in which to speak to some like-minded learners.

Five months or so ago, I embarked on a language learning adventure. I decided to learn Welsh. I'm not Welsh, I don't live in Wales, and I'm not planning on moving to Wales any time soon. Not that Wales isn't a lovely place, but it's not currently part of my plans.

It started as a bit of a joke. My partner's daughter, Lulu, started at Cardiff University last autumn and has the option of taking free Welsh lessons as part of her course. She scoffed at the idea, "Everyone speaks English! Why would I need to learn Welsh?". I explained that it might not be necessary, but why not take advantage of a free route to learning another language, but to no avail.

I can't say I blame her; I'd always been dismissive of the minority languages of the United Kingdom: Welsh, Gaelic, Cornish. They're dying out, aren't they?

Well, yes and no. Cornish is down to just a few scores of speakers and Gaelic has only around 50,000. But Welsh is a bit different. Welsh is still used. And it's still used by young people, for some of whom it's both a native and a first language. In fact, following a decline in the first half of the 20th century, Welsh is actually thriving somewhat, with the aim set by the Welsh Assembly to get one million speakers by 2050.

So back to Lulu. Every time we spoke following her enrollment at university I would ask her "Learning Welsh yet?" and every time she'd say "no", getting increasingly fed up with me asking, until one day she snapped, "If you love Welsh so much, why don't you bloody learn it?!". I saw that as a challenge and tentatively started looking for resources online.

My first port of call was Babbel, which I'd used in an aborted attempt to learn Spanish before, but alas they offer no Welsh course. I then found some excellent YouTube videos from WelshPlus, but they focussed entirely on familiarisation with the Welsh alphabet and pronunciation. Then someone suggested DuoLingo. DuoLingo courses are run by volunteers, who use the DuoLingo platform tools to create content to teach others. And DuoLingo has a Welsh course. And it's free. I signed up and dived into Cymraeg!

So, I'm now a Welsh learner, or Dysgwr Cymraeg, and I intend to chart my Welsh odyssey here.