Welcome to this Welsh course designed for use with a personal computer. In order that you may use this course effectively, you will need the following:

• PC or Mac (the faster the better) fitted with a sound card and speakers and running a recent (version 4 or better) web browser.
• A software media player that will play sound files of the .mp3 format. This is the format that is widely used for distributing music over the Internet.

The course is intended for:

• Complete beginners who would like an introductory taste of the language before joining a class. 

• Those learners who have had about 40-50 hours of tuition at stage 1 level and who would like a refresher course before embarking on a stage 2 course. 

• People who are unable to attend the more traditional-style class (particularly if they live outside Wales) and would prefer to try a computer-based course rather than one provided on audio cassette.

This course, which assumes no previous knowledge of Welsh, consists of twelve units, each unit introducing you to elementary language phrases used in the everyday dialect of North Wales as a whole. Just like any other language, Welsh dialect can be slighty different in two neighbouring towns, but the language in this course will be well understood and used over a wide area of North Wales.

The course is by no means complete, and you will almost certainly be wanting to know about things that are not included. Look on it as an introductory "snapshot". We have not included tables of verb-forms, but being a course in the electronic medium, this sort of thing could easily be added in the future. Apart from the present tense, the only other tense presented here is the simple past tense. You are introduced to the two most common mutations, nasal and soft. Don't worry if you have never heard of these terms, they will be explained.

There are twelve units in this course, some units are longer than others. Each unit consists of four main sections.  

• An introductory dialogue. The heading above the dialogue gives you the main points to be taught. Click where shown to hear the dialogue. 

• A list of vocabulary and phrases. Each item is clickable so that you can hear it. 

• An explanation, often labelled "Grammar". Don't be put off by this word. The section explains how the parts of the language relevant to the unit work. You can click on many of the words and phrases to hear how they are pronounced.

• Exercises. Just follow the instructions on the screen.

We would like to emphasize the point that this is primarily an introduction to spoken Welsh. The style of language is that which is used by people brought up in North Wales and whose mother tongue is Welsh. When you are working through the units, it is very important for you to say out loud the new words or phrases as soon as you have heard them. When you are learning a new word or phrase, it is a good idea to:  

• firstly to listen while looking at the screen for the meaning. 

• secondly to play the piece again as often as you wish without looking at the screen. You can do this by moving the mouse pointer away from the hyperlink (the piece that is underlined) once the player has loaded the sound file, and thereafter click on the player's own play button. When the player has finished playing the piece, it automatically skips back to the beginning. 

The second point above is important as it will help you to absorb the language by emphasising the hearing of it only (as opposed to seeing it as well). In the earlier days of learning a language, this is a necessary stage to go through if you wish to speak, listen and understand. If you concentrate solely on the written word, you will learn to read and write, but your learning to speak and understand will not develop very well.

You can check your pronunciation immediately by playing the word or phrase again while it is loaded into the software media player. One of the advantages of this system is that you can repeat the phrase over and over again as much as you like. If you are listening to a dialogue and wish to "wind back" a little while it is playing, just drag the slider back with your mouse. Have you ever tried to wind back to the exact place on a cassette tape in order to hear a repeat of that word or phrase you didn't quite get?

A note about the sound files in this course. When you are playing a clip of sound, the name of the file will usually appear somewhere on your media player. Some of the spellings may not be consistent with what you see on the screen. The screen spellings are the standard ones. Use these as your guide. If you have Windows 95, 98 etc, you may find that the media player is collapsed to an icon on the task bar when sound is being played. If you wish to have access to the media player in order to use its play and other buttons, just click once on the collapsed icon, and the player should appear on the screen.

We hope you will enjoy the experience of learning some Welsh with this introductory Clic Clic Cymraeg!

Howard Edwards Welsh language tutor, Audio Engineer and PC enthusiast.

Those involved in producing the course:

Course author and audio recording - Howard Edwards.

howard_edwards1@btinternet.com

Web page construction and editing the audio into .MP3 files - Pioden.

Thanks to Lesley Conran for some ideas from her own beginner's course.

Thanks to Howard's wife, and friends and neighbours in Llanfairfechan and Llanfairpwll for the loan of their voices!

Many thanks to FEDA Cymru (Further Education Development Agency) for funding the production of this course under the QUILT project 2000.

A note regarding accented characters
The company Pioden has advised us that for technical reasons, some accented characters will not be displayed correctly in some browsers, even though coding is available to produce them. In this course, the Welsh word for house is used. This word is ty, but the correct spelling has a circumflex above the y. The same applies to the word dwr (water) where there should be a circumflex above the w. Please note that in this course, these circumflexes are not displayed.

Click here to see the lesson content of the course, or go forward to lesson 1 >>>