I first visited a Buddhist temple when I was 12 and we lived in Sri Lanka. I have faint memories of the colours and the waves of incense, and of feeling relaxed even though I was usually shy and awkward in public. 

It would be another forty years before I started to pay serious attention to meditation, though. As is true for many people, it was an experience of suffering which brought me to that point – but the more I found that meditation helped reduce my suffering, the more I began to realise it could be a very helpful tool for language learners as well. 

The SaySomethingin Method (as you may already know!) puts your brain under a considerable amount of pressure – this is how it triggers the synapse growth which gives you the ability to speak a new language. People respond to this experience in two main ways. Some people find it playful, and we often see those people achieve confidence in their new language remarkably quickly.

Others, however (and it’s a more common experience) find it frustrating whenever they don’t say the same thing as the model voices – they see that as ‘making a mistake’, and feel bad about it. 

Every person I’ve talked to who has given up on a SaySomethingin course has given up because they become too frustrated with ‘making mistakes’.

Ironically, this is quite frustrating for me, because I know that the process of making mistakes is an extremely important part of the learning journey, and I know that everyone who keeps on playing the SaySomethingin game will eventually achieve the confidence they’re looking for.

I used to see this regularly when I was coaching celebrities for the S4C programme ‘Iaith ar Daith’. It’s pretty high stakes when you know that if you give up, your episode gets cancelled. I would try and help the people who were struggling by offering them insights into the learning journey – I was always trying to get them to understand that they should celebrate their ‘mistakes’, because if they did, the journey would become fun and successful.

Sometimes that was helpful. It was always very joyful to see someone suddenly change their perception, stop beating themselves up, and start enjoying the process.

But sometimes it wasn’t helpful. 

Try as I might, some of our celebrity learners found the whole journey extremely stressful, and beat themselves up very badly about it. That was a very distressing experience for me as well – sometimes I just wanted to hug them until they stopped hurting, as I would with one of my own children.

So where does meditation fit into all this?

When I was trying to help learners feel better about making mistakes, I was working directly with their emotions. Messy, complicated old things, emotions. It’s not impossible to work directly with emotions – all the best coaches do to some extent, in whatever field. But it’s a tough gig.

Meditation, at the very heart of it, is an exercise designed to help you become more familiar with the difference between two levels of your mind – the part which is aware, and the part which contains all your thoughts and feelings. It’s a subtle difference, but the easier it becomes for you to switch between those two levels of mind, the easier it becomes for you to deal with difficult emotions. 

There is a moment in the meditation journey when it becomes suddenly clear to you that when you are focused intensely on something – your breath, a candle, an apple, it doesn’t matter what – you are completely in the aware mind, and you don’t experience thoughts or feelings unless you let your focus go back to them. 

I think this might be what people are describing when they talk about ‘flow’, particularly in sports. When your focus is absolutely and entirely on the game, you don’t have room for distracting thoughts and emotions, and you operate at a noticeably higher level. 

Meditation isn’t a short-cut, though. It can take years!

I thought I might be stuck. Either I would have to work directly with people’s emotions, which can be a long, difficult path – or I needed to persuade them to trot off and spend a few years training with a Zen master before I tried to teach them a language. 

Neither of those fits very well with TV deadlines…;-)

Then I saw another option.

If I could help our learners become familiar with one simple instruction, I might be able to turn the language learning journey into its own kind of meditation. The learners would gain confidence in speaking their new language, and they’d also gain a new command of their own mind. 

The instruction is this:

The moment you notice yourself having a negative emotional reaction, place all your focus on the next voice you hear. 

That’s it.

That’s all it is.

And it’s extremely similar to the meditative process, where you bring your attention back to one particular thing whenever you notice your mind beginning to wander.

If you’re focusing properly, deeply, on the next voice, you’ll find that you don’t have room in the aware mind for the negative emotion.

If you’re experiencing the negative emotion, you’re not focusing on the voice (which will also damage the learning process). 

If you turn every negative emotion into a reminder to increase your focus on the next voice, you’ll be turning yourself into a super learner – you’ll become an absolutely unstoppable language learner. 

I’ve only just had this idea, and I’ve only just started using it in my coaching work, but I’m already seeing some very encouraging results. I think there’s something clear and simple about it that is much easier than trying to do the complicated work of changing emotions. I’ve got a crazy idea that I’d like to go and spend a month in a Buddhist community to see if monks would find this familiar enough to become incredibly fast language learners. If I ever manage to arrange that, I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes. 

SaySomethingin was honoured to be nominated for the Best EdTech Award at the 2024 Wales Technology Awards.

Their selection criteria was:

In the ever-evolving landscape of education, technology plays a pivotal role in transforming the way we learn and teach. The Best EdTech Application Award recognises the most exceptional and ground-breaking contributions to educational technology.

This award celebrates innovations that have a profound impact on educational processes, ranging from personalised learning solutions to cutting-edge teaching tools. We honour the visionaries who are enriching the world of education with their EdTech applications, making learning more engaging, accessible, and effective for students and educators alike.

Even though we didn’t receive the award, (congratulations to Animated Technologies, who did,) they are some very important selection criteria, and we appreciate all those who felt that we were one of the greatest examples of them for 2024.

In the week that the Wales XV travelled to the Aviva Stadium for their third match of the Six Nations Championship, a SaySomethingin team of Aran and Nick were also in Dublin to share SSi technology and methodology with key Irish language bodies.

Thanks to help from the Welsh Government’s Agile Cymru initiative, SSi has been able to build relationships with the Irish Government, the Irish equivalent(s) of our National Centre, Conradh na Gaeilge, Foras na Gaeilge, and the AI-driven digital language experts at ADAPT, who are based at Dublin City University.

There is a strong desire to use proven methods to increase the use of spoken Irish. The reaction to our presentations where Welsh was taught using SSi methodology was just brilliant.

Whilst it is still early days, SSi is confident in delivering an Irish course for English speakers with the help of these partners by the end of the year.

So, unlike the Welsh XV, the two SSi’ers came back buzzing with positivity.

SaySomethingin are honoured and proud to have gained Living Wage accreditation.

The Living Wage is an hourly rate of pay, independently calculated each year based on the real cost of living in the UK.

It is higher than the minimum wage and applies to all workers over 18, included contracted staff.

The Living Wage movement is made up of a wide range of businesses and organisations in every type of sector.

Those who have gained the accreditation include small independents, FTSE 100 companies and household names like; IKEA, Nationwide, Aviva, Everton and Chelsea Football Clubs, Majestic Wine, LUSH, the House of Commons and many more.

Everyone at SSi supports this initiative and will happily promote the Living Wage with all our learners, contacts and partners.

Check out the movement for yourself at www.livingwage.org.uk

The dramatic new Welsh language musical ‘Branwen: y Dadeni’ has just come to the end of a very successful run throughout Wales, selling out everywhere and gathering positive reviews, particularly for its scope and ambition. 

We followed its journey with particular interest (and with some free tickets as well!) because the Millennium Centre had asked SaySomethingin to help Rithvik Andugula prepare for his role as Matholwch, the King of Ireland (who marries Branwen and then imprisons her). 

Rithvik’s family come originally from India, but he lived in Cardiff for much of his childhood and got his GCSE in second language Welsh. He wasn’t a confident speaker, though, and Matholwch is one of the main parts, so he had some understandable nerves at the start of the process.

Fortunately, in a couple of intensive days with Aran, Rithvik turned out to be an extremely fast learner and to have a very good ear for the language. He was one of the fastest learners Aran has worked with, right up there with Carol Vorderman and Jeremy Vine, and his confidence improved dramatically as he saw the progress he was making. He was left with a mountain to climb with the script itself, but he worked his heart out and did superbly – he was convincing and entertaining on stage, bringing his natural swagger and rhythm to the role.

Rithvik is a very grounded young man, full of positive energy and compassion for others, and we’re looking forward to seeing him build a hugely successful career. He’s got all of Matholwch’s charm and humour, but without the tendency to imprison innocent Welsh women – we hope to see him continue his journey with the language and star in many more Welsh language productions in the future.

As Storm Debi threw rain, wind and freezing cold at all of us this week, The National Centre for Learning Welsh held an event that warmed all who attended.

The Norwegian Church Arts Centre, on the banks of Cardiff Bay, was the location for the official launch of a Learn Welsh resource to the skills section of The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.

The Centre developed the resource, covering 13 units that combine online self-study with practical tasks to introduce words, phrases and language patterns around themes such as Welsh music and culture.

To illustrate how learning the Welsh language can transform young lives, a panel of four recent learners described their learning experience and what it meant to them to enter the “Welsh Language World.”

Their open and honest descriptions of their Welsh language journey and how it has made their lives so much more rewarding were truly inspirational. As was the fact that all spoke so clearly and well in Welsh, a language none of them had spoken only two years before.

When asked about language tips for new learners, one of the panel, (with absolutely no prompting,) highlighted the importance of SaySomethingin to build confidence for spoken Welsh. He loved using the SSiW app whilst washing-up and in the bath!

SaySomethingin are happy to help any Welsh language learner wherever and whenever we can!

Llywodraeth Cymru Rhyngwladol | Welsh Government International 

SaySomethingin participated in the recent trade mission to Tokyo, Japan, organised by the Welsh Government.

We wanted to investigate potential uses for the SSi English facility we plan to build for Japanese speakers in 2024.

Working closely with Welsh Government representatives that are based in the British Embassy, meetings were held with officials of Japanese Prefectures, trade associations, educational experts, and language entrepreneurs.

We are extremely excited about the possibility of helping enhance spoken English for a range of Japanese audiences, and we will be closely monitoring this in the New Year since there appears to be a genuine need for this kind of service.

One unexpected initiative that surfaced while in Japan was a sincere, if modest, wish for a Welsh-to-Japanese module as well.

This extended to an association that oversees all cultural matters for the indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido who identified several connections between Ainu and Welsh history and culture, before commenting they would love to connect languages as well.

Who would have guessed that a strong desire to learn Welsh could exist so far away!?

In 2022, I had one of the more unexpected and entertaining experiences to bubble up out of working for SaySomethinginWelsh.

One of our Iaith ar Daith graduates, Joanna Scanlan (who won a best actress BAFTA for her hugely powerful work in ‘After Love’) messaged me to ask if I would help out a friend of hers who wanted to make sure that the north-east Welsh accents were right for a stage production of ‘The Corn is Green’ at the National Theatre in London. 

I’ve been working hard on saying ‘no’ to projects which aren’t on the main path for building SaySomethinginWelsh – going in too many different directions at once has always been a weakness of mine – and I managed to message Joanna back to say I didn’t think I was the right person. Saying ‘no’ felt like an important step forward in my personal development.

It was only a very small step, though. Joanna is not very fond of the word ‘no’. She called me, and I discovered that my new skill only stretched as far as written messages – on a live call, my ability to say ‘no’ vanished like the morning mist. 

I’m so glad Joanna didn’t accept my ‘no’! I ended up visiting the National Theatre three times during rehearsals, and getting to work with the extraordinarily talented Penny Dyer, who has done all sorts of fascinating projects, including ‘The Last Kingdom’ (which Catrin and I loved when we’d run out of ‘Vikings’) and once lying underneath a table just out of shot to coach Tom Cruise on his Russian accent. It was a steep and fascinating learning curve.

I felt full to overflowing with imposter syndrome the whole way through, but it was a glorious experience. Penny told me that the director, Dominic Cooke, was well-known for only working with friendly, positive people, and the atmosphere at rehearsals was a joy to witness. I embarrassed myself mildly by being slightly starstruck by Richard Lynch – when I explained to the others that he was a very well-known baddy in Pobol y Cwm, he said ‘I prefer to think he’s misunderstood’. Richard was a genuinely wonderful person, and ended up providing a new recording of our southern course, which has been enormously valuable. I also blotted my copybook by not knowing who Nicola Walker was, and telling her after one rehearsal that I thought she was building towards a really powerful performance. Putting that down in words makes me wince all over again.

All the actors I worked with were so friendly and positive and hard-working, by the time Catrin and I went down to watch the opening night, I was a bag of nerves, wanting them all to be absolutely perfect. When Richard nailed ‘Nos dawch’ instead of the more normal ‘nos da’ for him, I may even have given a very little fist pump quietly to myself. And the transformation from the last rehearsal I’d seen to the first night was breath-taking, all the playing with space and structure and props that I hadn’t seen before. I knew immediately that I wanted to come down for the last night as well.

David Marsland, the stage manager, was so kind that he gave us an extra couple of tickets for Catrin’s parents to come with us to the final night. Catrin’s mother Rose, who was 90, turned out to remember the film of ‘The Corn is Green’, so that became a mad-cap family trip to London, arriving out of breath just before the curtain went up. Then, thanks to David, we were able to take Catrin’s parents through to the after-show party, where her mother held court. The cast were delighted to meet their ideal target audience, a 90 year old Welsh speaker who remembered the film and had come all the way from Pwllheli to see the production – that was why they’d worked so hard on their accents – and they were all so lovely to Rose. Nicola Walker even gave Rose her leading lady flowers! When the party spilled out onto the South Bank, we could see people walking past wondering who Rose was, surrounded in her wheelchair by stars of stage and screen. It was very hard to persuade her to leave. 

I told Joanna that she’d gotten me well and truly bitten by the theatre bug, although it might be a little late in life for me to change careers. At the moment, I’m doing a bit of work with Rithvik Andugula, who is pushing himself extremely hard with his Welsh for a lead rôle in ‘Branwen: y Dadeni’, and once again I can’t wait for opening night. I told Joanna that I’d loved the experience so much, it had made me want to try and write for stage – she warned me that wasn’t going to be a very fast route back to the National Theatre! I don’t know if I could actually learn to write for stage, but I do know that any bits of coaching I get to help people with theatre productions, I’m always going to love. 

Oh, and several weeks after I thought all the fun was over, I got a postcard from Nicola Walker. ‘I love every second of Welsh language speaking we get to hear on the stage, it’s completely thrilling.’ Penny was right about Dominic – he only works with the loveliest people.

I don’t think I’ve ever been on a panel at the Eisteddfod before – not that I can remember, anyway. I’ve done other things – reenacted Merched Beca smashing tollbooths (in a very fetching dress), joined dozens of marches (which are always happily short on the Maes since nowhere’s too far away), and spent far too much time looking after stalls – but never actually been on a panel. 

So Wednesday last week, in the S4C pavilion, was a new, shiny experience for me (and new experiences are my favourite things, right up there with raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens). And what an interesting panel it was – chaired by Sara Peacock, the head of strategy for the Welsh language at S4C, and sitting beside two of our most wonderful Iaith ar Daith learners, Aleighcia Scott and Kiri Pritchard-Mclean. We had a big screen showing clips of Iaith ar Daith behind us, and we were talking mainly about the importance of confidence in the learning journey. 

We were also responding to some of the attacks that have been made on S4C recently for including a character in Pobol y Cwm who is on the journey of learning Welsh. 

As a long-term language activist myself, I’ve been puzzled by these attacks. They seem to be based on the idea that English being used in Pobol y Cwm is a ‘thin end of the wedge’ scenario, rather than an effective (and naturally limited) way to include learners in the Welsh-speaking cultural community. Sara made the hugely important point that to help encourage learners, we need to help Welsh speakers understand what does and doesn’t work – and while it’s okay to model the right way to support on Iaith ar Daith, we can’t focus on the mistakes that people make when we’re dealing with real people. It would be utterly unfair. 

So having a learner as a character on Pobol y Cwm lets us model the good and bad in a fictional setting where there’s no blame or embarrassment for real people. It’s exactly the right way to do it.

And it’s vital.

As people who care about the Welsh language, we have a very simple (and very stark) choice to make. We can focus on ‘purity’, on grammatical ‘correctness’, on making sure that Welsh speakers never have to suffer the horror of hearing a few words in English on television, or we can focus on friendliness, informality, enjoyment, connection, and encouraging more people to use more Welsh. 

The first option only leads in one direction. 

I said on the panel that it would be interesting to have one day at the Eisteddfod when every single person who made a grammatical error in their Welsh had to apologise to everyone else from the main stage, on television. It would be the quietest day in the history of the Eisteddfod. It would sound like a Zen retreat. Government ministers and chaired bards would be checking every sentence with online grammar tools before opening their mouths. 

And that silence descending over the Eisteddfod like a shroud would be the sound of a language dying. 

It is in speaking a language that confidence grows – and it is also, ironically enough, in speaking a language that learners acquire the neural webs that lead to them speaking more ‘normally’ or more ‘correctly’. This is how languages work. We have to start by encouraging speech, and then everything else follows.

People like Kiri and Aleighcia are every bit as passionate about the Welsh language as any language activist. They also have the crucial ability and energy to build new audiences for the language, and to encourage more people to feel connected to Welsh, to feel interested in learning. If we want the genuinely bilingual country we are absolutely capable of building, we have to welcome, to encourage and to celebrate people like Kiri and Aleighcia. They will dive in (with the extraordinary courage needed to go through a learning process on television), they will use English when their Welsh runs short, but they will keep on going, keep on learning, keep on using more and more Welsh, and they and others like them will bring the rest of Wales with them. 

Iaith ar Daith is just the beginning. Archimedes said ‘Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.’ S4C has the opportunity and the vision to normalise high-profile Welsh people becoming confident Welsh speakers, and becoming passionate advocates of the Welsh language. That will become our lever, and it will change the future of our country. 

Education.SouthAsia is a collaboration between the University of Oxford and University College London that invites original and analytic pieces that make interdisciplinary contributions to the issue of education in South Asia.

Last week they ran a piece about our work in Sri Lanka, written by our very own Tom Cassidy, that focussed on our “Anyone Can Teach” initiative with the charity The Tea Leaf Trust in the country.

In 2019, four of us went to visit a company in Guangzhou in the south of China that we had been told might be interested in an English course for Mandarin speakers. We had a fascinating time, and we really liked some of the people in the company that we met – but they told us, in the most polite terms possible, that they wouldn’t be interested in working with us if our course was based on static mp3 files. ‘It would be too easy to copy them,’ they said, and then, with a wink, ‘In fact, it would make more sense for us just to copy them ourselves!’

They were interested in testing our approach, though, if we could move the method into a streaming environment that would be more difficult to copy. By the time we were sitting in Hong Kong airport for the flight home, we knew there was a serious challenge in front of us. 

It’s a long old flight from Hong Kong to Caernarfon (and it’s not even direct yet!). I remember sitting on that Emirates plane and thinking about how streaming could work. It was 10 years since we’d shared our first few Welsh lessons, and those early 100s of users had become thousands and then tens of thousands. 

How wise was it to change what we were doing?

But the more I thought about it, the more I started to realise something exciting. Moving into streaming wasn’t a gamble – it was a way to make enormously valuable improvements to our entire approach. I started thinking about all the reasons people didn’t carry on with SaySomethinginWelsh, and I began to see ways to solve the underlying problems in a streaming environment.

Then it dawned on me that the way we would be able to monitor progress in a streaming environment would map perfectly to the kind of data collection that allows for AI-driven improvements – and the seed of the idea for our AutoMagic Tutor had been planted.

It’s taken us 3 years to get to a working implementation, and we’ve still got work to do. As you might remember, early in 2020 we all found ourselves in a global pandemic, and then in various flavours of lockdown. It was difficult for everyone: challenging for mental health, challenging for communications, challenging for working patterns.

But we kept going.

And as of now, our AutoMagic Tutor can already allow learners to go at different speeds (which has enormous implications for how many people are successful with the method) and to choose how long they spend learning – and the basis is there for increasing personalisation and gamification over the coming years. 

We’ve been test driving the AutoMagic Tutor with the National Centre for Learning Welsh, and with our Welsh government-backed schools pilot project, and with our work on the current series of the S4C show ‘Iaith ar Daith’. The results so far are genuinely exciting – I’ve seen people struggle with the static files and then achieve huge success with the AutoMagic Tutor. I’m confident it’s going to let us help tens of thousands more people to become confident Welsh speakers, and I can’t wait to see it being used in more schools.

And yes, we’re still in touch with that company in Guangzhou. We’ve been testing our approach to English with a number of projects in Sri Lanka (including some enormously worthwhile charity projects) and the results so far are very promising. We’re hoping to test an AutoMagic Tutor for English for Mandarin speakers in Shanghai before the end of this year, and the first company we spoke to are going to look at the results with a view to scaling if the trials go well.

Sometimes, persistence doesn’t just get you through the difficult times, it opens up entirely new possibilities. Entirely new ways to try and help make the world a little better, which is what we’re lucky enough to be trying to do.

The great and the good of the global EdTech sector were joined by Tom and Nick of SSi at London’s Tobacco Dock for the 10^th edtechX conference towards the end of June.

What an event!

Many of the leading lights who are pushing the limits of technology to deliver a wide range of developments for all aspects of education were there.

For example, the possibilities that Artificial Intelligence,(Ai,) is opening for every aspect of education will transform the sector but, hold on, check out Organoid Intelligence (Oi,) that will take Ai to another level!

We lapped up such insights and are now thinking how to incorporate them within SSi delivery systems.

A packed agenda of speakers and panels were interspersed with networking sessions, all topped off with a gala dinner!

Tom and Nick made the most of the whole day and made some amazing contacts that will help SSi as we seek working partnerships in the future.