J asked me about my Welsh presentation, and here is the story.
I told my phonetics students that they would need to tackle a new language. They'd need to figure out where its sounds overlapped with the sounds of English, and learn how to make the unfamiliar sounds. They'd need to find a way to practice regularly, putting forth a little bit of consistent effort all across the month of November, and do a 5-minute group presentation about their language in December.
I also told them that they could pick a language for me to learn, and I'd present first to give them a sense of what I was looking for. They picked Welsh.
Dutifully, wanting to set a good example, I started the Duolingo Welsh course. But Duolingo changed its interface in November, and I'm not a fan. I had also forgotten that I don't like being a total beginner, and so I kept saying to myself, "Seems like a Spanish kind of a day!"
Good news: I did advance in the Spanish course in November. Bad news: the Spanish course does not help a person speak Welsh.
The other good news, the news that saved my bacon, is that a 5-minute presentation is pretty much nothing and I had told them it should have some interactive elements. A chunk of it had to be in English, because even if I were able to talk about divergent sound systems while speaking Welsh, it wouldn't have made any sense to any of my students. So with a lot of help from Google Translate and the blithe confidence that came from knowing the room held no actual speakers of this language I could not actually speak, I plowed through it.
The title of this post (at least according to Google Translate) means "I do not speak Welsh." Still true, unfortunately.
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