Back from Welsh weekend

Had another great weekend at Abergavenny learning Welsh – I nearly said speaking Welsh – and that is certainly one of the big motivators for me. I haven’t yet found a local(ish) person or group. Obviously working on learning a language without opportunity to speak it (except to the dog) is a bit problematic, and although my background as a Welsh second language speaker helps enormously, it was great to be able to focus on this for a weekend.

I opted for a higher level class which had a tutor I have had before who puts a fair emphasis on grammar. This is undoubtedly a good thing for me: I know I have big holes in my grammar – and I find working on these hard on my own, and much less tempting than reading, listening to the radio, watching Welsh TV or even occasionally writing in Welsh. Karen got us to do a test (from some examination paper, or course, I think) at the beginning of the weekend; took it in; worked on the things that most people in the class were getting wrong – and re-tested us at the end. Classic pre-post test stuff. I had to leave early to catch the train and so took the marked test and promised (1) to redo the test on the train and (2) not to look at the marked version until I had. I kept both promises and found the result really interesting. I had indeed improved on some things that we had been taught – but had introduced new mistakes! I cheered myself up my reminding myself that this is exactly what happens in skill development in children – and indeed in language development; new things are often over-generalised leading to a dip – which is of course followed by an increase in performance. Looking forward to seeing that – and promising myself I will do some grammar exercises before the next course as well as looking out for and noticing grammatical structure in my reading