FOLLOW Gwent Olympian Jamie Baulch as he learns Welsh as part of the S4C programme cariad@iaith.

DAY 4

I'm a lot more energetic today and my voice is sounding more and more Welsh! I can hear my accent getting a bit stronger and singsong! Today's been a good day. A few of us escaped to the local Indian restaurant and I feel all spiced up today and am raring to go!

The task today was making papier mache sculptures of each other in half an hour. I had to make one of Rebecca and with me being the most competitive on the team, I really thought I'd nailed it, but I didn't win and Chris got there first.

His mask of Steve was phenomenal and the resemblance was uncanny. I tried to make one of Rebecca and thought I did quite a good job with those pouty lips! I used 'gwellt' (straw) for her 'gwallt' (hair) but it was such a laugh and everyone did really well. Rebecca returned the favour and did me with my dreadlocks that I used to have and my Olympic medal.

We learnt a lot of new words such as ' siswrn' (scissors) 'torri' (to cut) 'gludo' (to glue) and 'peintio' (to paint).

It was a nice exercise which wasn't too physical and the sun came out to shine for the first time in a week.

I know what I need to do now after each lesson. I need to have lots of sentences written down and done in English and Welsh and have them written phonetically – because once you have a sentence and play with it and use hundreds of different sentences. I want to see if I can do that myself.

This afternoon Ioan took us for the second session and we had to do bingo in Welsh to learn the numbers properly. I was one away from getting 'full house'. It's such a simple exercise but it makes you concentrate and I can easily count to a hundred now just after one session. That's definitely the biggest progression so far.

We also learnt a song about different parts of the body, ' pen-glin' (knee), pen (head), 'penelin ' (elbow), 'pen-ôl' (backside)– I got quite excited and got carried away. I'm a lot more confident, but I know I have a long way to go and I don't want to compare myself with others, but it's slowly coming together. Being on Radio Wales with Eleri was fun and the better weather definitely helps too and that changes everyone's mood.

The whole thing is pretty exhausting though so I'll be glad of a good night's sleep tonight. Nos da!