Is Welsh way too complicated?

[Seabedsurfer]

I was wondering about the Welsh language seeing there are thousands of people in the UK that speak it including Prince of Wales, Archbishop Rowan Williams & Rhys Ifans etc etc. Is it really heavily inflected like Gaelic and have all those nasty subjunctive tenses and feminine and masculine nouns like French and non-phonetic spelling like English or is it more regular and straight forward? What kind of sense of humour is portrayed through the language; like French people like to use puns through French to express their humour. Can anyone tell me a famous Welsh joke or pun and translate it so I can whip it out at cocktail parties and look really cultured? thank you. God bless    

[Foxglove]

Welsh is a fine language to learn and is much simpler than French for example as there are no masculine and feminine nouns. There are a number of mutations where the first letter of a word is pronounced differently according to the word which comes before it, but the mutation allows one to pronounce the word in a much more 'tongue-friendly' way so to speak so it comes naturally. As for humour, well the same rules apply as in English for example. I can't really give an impression of this without writing in Welsh, and then translating which would lose the impact of the joke. One of the easiest phrases I can give you is the Welsh for "Good night". It is "Nos da" which sounds as if you are saying "no star". Do you have Welsh connections?

[kempie]

See if you can pick up the language here

Nos da.

[Peter Pedant]

Oh God - look at mutations and it will put you off for life1

Toch ddin bob seis

[bernardo]

No, it is not inflected as much as Gaelic (e.g. it does not have the noun cases)
Yes, it does have masculine and feminine nouns
No, it does not have non-phonetic spelling (the spelling of both Welsh and Gaelic are very regular, although the pronuncialtion rules of Gaelic are more complicated due to the use of vowels to indicate the softness/hardness of the consonants)
It is quite easy to get used to most of the mutations fairly quickly.

[SteveD]

If you go to the BBC web site, then Languages and find your way to Welsh, you will be able to follow a BBC Wales programme which was called "The Big Welsh Challenge".  A group of Welsh people ("celebrities") were paired up so that there was one Welsh speaker and one non-Welsh speaker.  The non-Welsh speaker had to learn to sing the Welsh National Anthem - in Welsh, of course!  It's quite fun to watch the videos.

As far as learning Welsh is concerned, two of the main difficulties seem to be (a) learning the gender of a word (which is important for certain mutations) and (b) plurals (which seem to me to be arbitrary).