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How long does Welsh take to learn?
It’s truly remarkable how unrelated Welsh and English are, particularly given how geographically close Wales and England are to each other. I won’t bore you with the whys and wherefores, I’ll give you the rough hours:
- Survival basics (A2) – 300
- Everyday conversations (B1) – 500
- Comfortable fluency (B2) – 1,000
- Near-native fluency (C1) – 1,700
Welsh is Britain’s oldest living language (and it definitely looks the part!). Though it’s similar to the other native languages spoken (Cornish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic) on this wonderful island I call home, it has very little (almost nothing, really) in common with English, which is pretty much a foreigner around these parts.
Thus, you’re kinda starting from scratch with Welsh. But that’s not to say you’ll struggle. You won’t. There are things that’ll require more time and patience – the mutation system, for example: Welsh has a somewhat bizarre practice of changing the first letter of a noun depending on what word comes before it.
The spelling, as you well know if you’ve seen any Welsh words, is a bit nuts, too. But Welsh is mostly phonetic, so once you know how letters are pronounced, things stay pretty consistent.
To get your very own learning estimate, play around with the calculator above. That’s what we built it for 🙂