Author's Note: Click on the hyperlinks for useful websites to help you learn Welsh!
September 17, 2004
It's been a while, hasn't it, since I wrote here in my Welsh language journal. It's been pretty quiet these past few months...up until recently. I'd just been going on like usual, working in the Crying Fowl and trying to study Welsh on my own with my books and the internet. It was really kind of difficult, though, like I've mentioned before, without other people to help practice with. I had started thinking about going to one of those summer intensive classes, like they have out at Aberystwyth or Nant Gwrtheyrn-I found a great website called ELWa - Welsh for Adults with information about all sorts of Welsh courses and a language learning helpline.
But then, just when I'd about given up on learning Welsh out here in Knights Ferry, England on my own, I had an interesting experience a few weeks ago. I'd just switched from the Wednesday night shift to the Thursday night shift. The bar was quiet, just like I'd expected. Then, the old wooden door opened and in came a group of about ten people laughing and chatting-and danged if they weren't speaking Welsh! That night I discovered the Knights Ferry Welsh Club.
I hadn't known this, but there are a fair amount of Welsh societies across the border in England, not to mention all over the world! I started talking to this gorgeous woman named Elen-combine Catherine Zeta-Jones' looks with Cerys Matthews' angelic voice, and you still won't be able to imagine how great this girl is-and she told me about how a bunch of residents of Knights Ferry and the surrounding towns had met online in the Clwb Malu Cachu Yahoo Group and decided to get together to form a club to practice in person.
So I've started practicing with them every Thursday night-it's not like the pub is very busy, anyway, so I just cop a lean over the bar and listen in. And to my surprise, I've picked up a little more Welsh just in the past couple of Thursdays. It makes such a big difference to have real people to practice with. I highly recommend it. Even if you're all the way in the U.S., I've heard that there are quite a few local American Welsh societies, and several on the national level.
Anyway, the first thing I noticed when I joined this group was that I had to start learning to ask and answer questions in Welsh. It's the key to getting to know people. Questions like "where are you from originally?" and "what's your name?" are a great way to start. So I taught myself the basic question words, as in, Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How: Pwy, Beth, Pryd, Ble, Pam, Sut. Soon I was asking (and answering) useful questions like these:
