Is Welsh really hard to learn?
More people than ever are learning Welsh since the start of the pandemic. At least that’s what news outlets have been telling us.
I can certainly see the growing sentiment towards our native tongue. Whenever I mention that I’ve learnt it to people, many of them now say they really should give it a go.
But how many would-be learners are held back by thinking Welsh is hard to learn? For me, there’s two problems here.
Firstly, like most British people, we began life as monoglots. So we have no idea how hard it is to learn to speak a second language well. So we imagine it’s really quite hard. But since the majority of the world’s population speaks at least two languages, and often more, I think we’ve let ourselves over-estimate just how challenging it is.
This also means we don’t have a broad cultural understanding of what the most effective learning methods are. Is it drilling verb conjugations? Spending hours studying lengthy word lists?
I finished my GCSES in 2004 with an A in Welsh second language. But I managed to memorise my oral exams word for word. I couldn’t really speak fluently or with variety. I’m not even sure I could have ordered a coffee if the server had asked me anything after my ‘Ga i goffi os gwelwch yn dda?’.
A few years later, a Welsh-speaking university friend laughed in my face when I tried to guess how to say something. No wonder we don’t have a great sense of how to learn languages.
So what does work?
In 2017, I decided I wanted to learn Welsh again, properly this time. I downloaded an app called SaySomethingInWelsh, an audio course that gets you speaking straight away. Within a month I knew more grammar patterns than I’d ever learnt in 12 years of school lessons. And learning by speaking gave me an instinct for how to use these patterns without intense study.
This was all well and good, but I was living in England at the time. A few exciting exchanges with service staff while back home for holidays were my only chances to actually speak Welsh with someone else.
So when a year later, I met someone at a house party who also did, I asked them right away if we could go to the pub every week to practice. Thankfully, he agreed!
I then began a slow, and sometimes very tiring few months of turning up at the pub every Wednesday, trying to speed up my recall and learn new words. My speaking partner has the patience of a saint, and helped me burn loads of new words into my synapses.
Gradually it got easier and easier, before my only barriers were the range of vocabulary I recognised. At that point, I started reading learner books and listening to lots of Radio Cymru.
So there you have your simple model for learning a language. Find an audio course that uses ‘spaced repetition’ principles (like SaySomethingIn), and find a patient first language speaker to practise with every week until you can speak smoothly.
But what about Welsh? Is it a really hard language to learn?
If you google ‘is Welsh hard to learn’, you’ll see really unhelpful answers claiming Welsh takes twice as long to master as French:
“Welsh is one of the toughest Western European languages to master and is even harder than Swahili, it has been claimed in a new study. … And at 1,040 hours, learning Welsh takes nearly double the time than it does to become fluent in French, which at 550 hours is one of the easiest of languages examined.”
This is really misleading for several reasons.
- Modern Welsh grammar is pretty easy for English speakers to learn. There are no direct and indirect objects, verb ‘moods’, aspects or arrays of unfamiliar tenses like in French. And there are just 3 truly irregular verbs.
- While Welsh shares less common vocab with English than French of Spanish, it’s very normal to use English words in Welsh sentences when the Welsh term isn’t at the front of the speaker’s mind. In fact, many first language speakers do this, especially when talking about parts of their lives that happen mainly through the medium of English. This is a hugely helpful crutch to help you carry on speaking Welsh while you’re still extending your vocab.
- It doesn’t have to take nearly as long as agencies like these claim if you follow the method above.
If you want to start exploring the rich habit of our native language, from place names that describe the landscape, to great animal names (moch daear, ‘earth pig’ is a badger), you can start experiencing it very quickly. I can’t tell you just how much it’s enrichened my life, but you can find out by getting started.
Do you have questions about my learning journey, or tips for others reading this? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Oh, and DON’T USE DUOLINGO.