If you only knew plenty of Welsh words you would be able to communicate quite a lot. Words are like the beads on a necklace ..... and the string links them all together and sequences them.... the string is the grammar. Your primary duty as a learner of Welsh is to know lots of words !
So .... I wonder how many Welsh words you know right now.
Mind you, there are at least two sorts of "knowing." When you are reading a book or listening to speech, you are often understanding what is being written or said without actually knowing all the words. But when you need to write or speak Welsh, you need to be able to get the words from your memory out of nowhere and use them all correctly! These are two very different skills!
Task 1 .....
You can find out how many words you understand/recognise fairly accurately quite simply. Just choose a few pages at random in the Welsh-English side of the dictionary , and count how many words you understand on each page.
Suppose you find that, on average, you understand 15 words per page. If the Welsh-English section is 300 pages long, then you "know" 300 x 15 = 4500 words.You won't be far out.
Of course, a much trickier task is to do the same thing with an English dictionary ! A few random pages as before , but this time you see how many of the English words you can translate into Welsh. Ouch !
Task 2 .....
A much harder task is coming up now. Pick any old page from a Welsh book, and pick out the 5th word on the 5th line. This is just a way of getting a random word..
Okay, you've got your "randomly chosen word." What does it begin with ?
Let's say it begins with G.
Now you've got 5 minutes to write down as many Welsh words of 3 or more letters which begin with a G.
It's a long 5 minutes I can tell you !
Do the whole process a few times so you've tried several different random initial letters.
Okay ... so, let's say you did 5 different letters and got 11, 18, 15, 21 and 15 = 80 words.
That's 80/5 = 16 per letter . Multiply that by 25 ...... ignoring the odd letter that only begins very few words ....
Roughly, that's about 400 + words you've managed to drag kicking and screaming out of the jumbled-up filing cabinet that is your Welsh mind!
The reliability of this second task is not totally marvellous, but it does give you a window into what words are available to you ........ plus, as a bonus, it might frighten you to death !
You should now have some idea of how many words you can drag out of your memory and actually use at short notice. Pretty frightening ?
Another interesting thing you can do is, to work out the reading age of a passage that you find easy to read..... we will look at this soonest ! Meanwhile, here's Mr Huw taking his music to the people with Ofn bod Ofn ...... there seem to be t