Tuesday 21 March 2017

The problems of different dialect and registers

Anyone learning Welsh has to contend with the differences of dialect and register.  Yes, it's true for every language to some degree, but Welsh has no 'standard form' and there is no key accent or dialect to aim for, unlike English, French, Spanish, German, etc.   I came up against this problem with my first attempts to learn Welsh - I had no idea that the grammar book that I had borrowed from the library was a very literary form of Welsh, and didn't reflect what people actually spoke.  Then, in the late 1970s I had a book which taught 'Cymraeg Byw' - an attempt to produce a form of the language that was easier for learners.  It smoothed out some of the variations, but of course, no native speakers actually spoke like that.

Nowadays some of the books are produced in Northern and Southern variations, although I understand that there are at least five distinct dialects of Welsh.  The advice is to learn the Welsh of the area that you are living in - not much help for those who are not living in Wales - and nowhere near any of the classes in England, either. So, I'm faced with trying to decide which variation of the language I'm trying learn every time I come up with a difference - not ideal.

I've bought a number of grammar books to support my learning - grammars, lists of phrases and idioms, prepositions and verbs.  I've bought conjugations of verbs in French, Spanish and German before now - and, because of the standardised version in each of these languages the form of them has been the standard language - as generally written, but which doesn't vary enormously from careful standard speech.  The Welsh verb list that I have bought is useful, but is a literary form of the language.  Does anyone produce a verb list of conjugations in a spoken form?  Dunno - I continue my searches.  

When learning languages in the past I've been able to buy books of exercises that reinforce different aspects of the grammar - a page of written exercises on the Imperfect, Future, Conditional, Subjunctive, etc - A4 size, with room to write your answers on the same pageThese don't seem to exist in the same way in Welsh.  I've got a couple of books of Welsh Exercises, but these are small, and don't give you the room to write it on a page - fair enough, but I have to maintain a book to write these things in, and it's not easy to go back to revise them.

Short term, I've begun compiling my own verb lists, using the grammar books that I have - putting them into DTP software so that it is easy to correct them, or move sections around.  This is a helpful exercise, because it's reinforcing the conjugated forms, as well as reminding me of the relationships between the various tenses and aspects. I can also print off the notes for when I go boating.

Also, what about accent?   Some of the courses that I've listened to in the past have gone for native speakers with different accents to give the listener an idea of how different accents sound - but that doesn't help me to develop a more authentic accent.  Being a lone learner, how do I know that I'm not ending up with an accent that is the equivalent of a learner of English speaking with a mixture of Geordie, Cockney and Cornish accent?  What if I end up with a Northern accent, but a Southern dialect and vocabulary?   Now that I've worked my way through the Duolingo course, I've started listening to Say Something In Welsh - for some reason I've gone for the Southern version.  I don't know why, I just had to make a choice.  There are aspects of the Northern dialect that I don't feel so comfortable with, because of how I have learned Welsh in the past, but I'm now finding that there are aspects of the Southern dialect that don't sit well with me.  

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