Learners’ Resources: Get Fluent!

The same wonderful people-or rather, person-who brought you the Welsh learners' website and Yahoo group Clwb Malu Cachu, now offers an excellent online subscription service that is meant to supplement any Welsh books or courses you might be using. I've mentioned Get Fluent before, but today's article gives you a full review of the pdf worksheets, which get delivered weekly via e-mail. Each worksheet is independent of the others, so it doesn't matter where you start, although each week's installment contains the answers to the previous week's worksheet.

Each worksheet contains a variety of grammar exercises, vocabulary, puzzles, readings, and translation practice, all of which revolve around a different theme each week. The exercises in each worksheet are of gradually increasing difficulty, so that they are appropriate for learners at different levels, as long as you have a very basic knowledge of how the language works (i.e., how to construct a simple sentence, basic vocabulary such as "to be," "to do," and "to go"). The farther you get in the worksheet, the more challenging the exercises are-introducing more complex grammatical structures and encouraging the learner to practice writing more extensively.

This is a great advantage of the Get Fluent service, in my opinion-its ability to be tailored to different learners. The majority of written courses in any language tend to progress, unit-by-unit, with each subsequent unit getting more difficult-and this method makes perfect sense. Get Fluent, with its graded exercises, makes an ideal companion to a traditional course of study by providing both review of simpler concepts and more challenging vocabulary and translation exercises to stretch your knowledge no matter what your skill level may be. I did notice, however, that some word forms were different from what I was used to, and this may be true for you depending on which regional forms of Welsh you are learning.

Because each worksheet is divided into short sections, it is ideal for those who can only afford a brief period of time each day to study (which is probably most of us!). An extensive vocabulary list is provided with each week's installment, and much of the vocab words revolve around a chosen theme (going on holiday, Vikings and Norse mythology, to name a few). It tends to be easier to remember words that you can associate with one another in a given context or on a particular subject, and Get Fluent makes excellent use of this. Word lists include everyday vocabulary that is frequently used, more advanced vocabulary for those expanding their mental dictionaries, and plenty of interesting, fun words that might not get used every day but greatly improve your ability to speak about a particular topic.

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