Functional Welsh Short Courses
Designed to complement the main courses whilst also providing a standalone course for people with a particular interest in the areas they cover Functional Welsh short courses provide a familiarisation with a range of subjects. At this moment in time the courses offered look at weather, place/town names, and crag names though there is every chance more will be added as interest in other areas is expressed (feel free to get in contact).
Functional Welsh short courses will be offered as evening courses both online and in person and largely during the autumn-winter-spring. In person courses will take place at Beacon Climbing Centre in Caernarfon, North Wales whilst online courses will take place on a video conferencing software with details being sent out prior to the date of the course.
Pricing wise each course will be £25 with an option of attending all three for £55; it being possible to use the ‘tickets’ for these in any online or in-person session within 12 months proceeding purchase. Booking can be done below and to take advantage of the £55 offer please email us.
Each course is pending MTA CPD approval. All of the courses are suitable for English and Welsh speakers alike with no requirement or need to have been on any of the other Functional Welsh courses before attending. Pronunciation will be covered throughout each course.
Town/Place Names
So much of our work and so many of our courses focus on the high places and the wilder places but what of the places in between. On this course we will look at the place name of towns, cities, and villages focusing on the key elements and themes that run through place names in Wales. Focusing on the key areas of water, religion, and important buildings we will learn how these categories have influenced a wide range of place names in Wales.
Like Functional Welsh for the Mountains we will look at how you can use the knowledge gained from the course to interpret place names from their components and weave those meanings into the facts and stories you tell groups or even just understand for yourself.
In Person
Online
Weather
Weather; a perennial conversation topic and a subject we will interact with whenever we are leading or just existing in the outdoors. Of course, Wales is not always known for having the best weather and yet surely this gives you all the more reason to learn how to describe it with humour via expressions describing old ladies and their sticks falling from the sky to thick fog that would have been used by quarrymen to evade their supervisors and escape home.
There are, predictably, over a hundred expressions to describe rain in Welsh and on this course we will have a look at a range of them along with how to describe other weather elements such as sun, wind, snow, sleet, clouds, temperature etc.. On top of this we will look at various sayings and folk knowledge that has been used across Welsh history to predict and describe various weather phenomena to potentially give you a little step up in dodging that next rain showers.
In Person
Online
Crag Names
Ever wondered why there are so many ‘cities’ in Bwlch Llanberis/The Pass; why every mountain seems to have a llechog, or who these ‘geifr’ are that seem to own every ‘rock’ and ‘castle’ then no more as these are exactly the subjects of this short course. We will look at the component parts of crag names including the actual physical features, colours, and the animals and things that often make up the rest of the names; if there is interest, we can even look at the different Welsh names for the features that you might find on these crags.
Perhaps the closest of these courses to Functional Welsh for the Mountains and with considerable overlap of terms but with a closer look at terms such as ‘llech’, ‘allt’, and ‘dinas’ that only receive a nod in that courses book. Very much designed for those who do a large portion of their work on the crags and rock-walls of Wales of Wales with a particular focus on the crags of Eryri.