Emilius wrote:And concerning the literal Welsh: I suppose that newspapers are written in the formal "1588 Bible" style. What about modern Welsh literature or poetry? Are most of them written in the standard or in the modern spoken Welsh? And how hard would it be for me to understand the standard when I learn spoken Welsh? Is the common Welshman familiar with the formal Welsh?
Well, most papers wouldn't be quite so literary as the 1588 Bible. Some are reasonably formal, while others (e.g.
yr Herald which if I remember correctly is a national weekly paper) are in a more informal register pretty similar to the spoken language (also the way that most people tend to write letters and things like that). Interestingly, the TV news as read on S4C tends to be quite a lot more formal - not quite the full-on literary language but much more formal than everyday spoken varieties of Welsh.
As for modern literature, there's again quite a variation. Some books are quite literary and formal in style while others are a lot more informal and sometimes quite dialectal. For instance, Caradog Pritchard's
Un Nos Ola'r Leuad is mostly written in a Bethesda dialect which I found much easier to understand by reading it aloud and hearing the sounds than by trying to read silently and recognise the forms (living within 5 miles of Bethesda and having learnt a very similar dialect helps a lot). There are a couple of chapters, though, that are written in a very formal style.
Poetry, of course, has all kinds of archaic/obscure vocabulary and often relies heavily on some of the more inflected forms that are standard in the literary language but rare in speech and informal writing. I'm sure there are plenty of poets who write in a less formal register though.
Unless your first interest is in reading older or very formal literature, it's probably best to learn a spoken variety of Welsh first. I know there are quite a lot of Welsh speakers, even native ones, who find the literary language quite heavy going. I've known first-language Welsh speaking Christians who will read an English Bible in preference to the Welsh one because they find the language of the latter almost impenetrable (the 1988
Beibl Cymraeg Newydd is better in that respect than the 1588, but it's still very formal).