Basic Welsh: A Grammar and Workbook comprises an accessible grammar handbook and related exercises in a single volume.
The book presents forty grammar units, covering the core materials which beginning students would expect to encounter in the course of learning Welsh. User-friendly grammar points are followed by multiple examples and exercises which allow students to reinforce and consolidate their learning.
Key features include:
- Clear, accessible format
- Many relevant and useful examples
- A wide range of challenging exercises to reinforce learning
- Concise and jargon-free explanations of grammar
- Full answer key, glossary of technical terms and Welsh-English, English-Welsh glossary at the back of the book
Revised throughout, this updated second edition of Basic Welsh provides the ideal practice book for all beginning students in the language. It is suitable for both class use and independent study.
Introduction
1 Identification sentences: question words Pwy?, Beth?; identifiers hwn, hon; hwnna, honna; y rhin, y rheina
2 Nouns and noun plurals
3 The verb ‘to be’: present tense statements (AFF) and questions (INT)
4 The present tense of bod: NEG forms
5 Mutations: Soft Mutation
6 The definite article: ‘the…’
7 The genitive construction: the X of Y’ etc.
8 Adjectives
9 The present tense of verbs
10 Other auxiliaries with the VN; requests
11 The complement marker yn + noun/adjective
12 Personal pronouns; word order; third-person singular rule
13 ‘Want’ and ‘would like’
14 Aspirate and Nasal Mutation
15 Possessive adjectives: ‘his…’, ‘her…’, ‘your…’, etc.
16 Yn and mewn ‘in’
17 The imperfect of bod: ‘I was’, ‘you were’, etc.
18 The future of bod: ‘I will be’, etc.; affirmative markers fe and mi
19 The imperfect and future of other verbs: ‘I was …ing’, ‘I will…’
20 The existential verb: ‘There is/are…’, ‘There was/were…’, etc.
21 Conjugated prepositions
22 More conjugated prepositions
23 Possession
24 Stems; imperatives (command forms)
25 The inflected preterite: completed action in the past
26 General principles with inflected verbs (verbs with endings)
27 Irregular preterites: ‘went’, ‘came’, ‘did’, ‘got’
28 Mo after inflected NEG verbs
29 Present tense ‘is/are’ with question words
30 Numerals 1-12; telling the time
31 More numbers; Faint…/ ‘How much/many…/’; quantity expressions
32 Days, months and years
33 ‘Some’ and ‘any’, ‘no-one’, ‘everyone’; ‘all’
34 Rhaid-type expressions: well, waeth, man a man, hen bryd
36 Derived adverbs in yn; summary of meanings and uses
37 Wedi: ‘perfect’ tense
38 The pluperfect and future perfect
39 Yes/no answers; tags
40 Translating have
Key to exercises
Glossary of technical terms
Vocabularies
Welsh-English
English-Welsh
Biography
Gareth King is UCAS co-ordinator, Oxbridge applications co-ordinator and Latin co-ordinator for a large sixth-form college. He is also the series editor for the Colloquials and the Routledge Welsh Reader.