Carol Vorderman grew up near Rhyl, but not as a Welsh speaker
Her Welsh identity has always been important to her, however, even as she built a hugely successful career on television working mostly in England.
She agreed to take on the challenge of ‘Iaith ar Daith’ – 4 days of travelling around Wales filming every day and speaking as much Welsh as possible – because she felt it was time to reconnect with home.
She had 2 days with us to prepare – and she was starting from scratch.
As I walked from my hotel over to her house in Bristol for day 1, I was feeling pretty nervous. It was clear that even with the strengths of the SSi Method, we were really pushing the limits of what was possible, and I wasn’t sure we had enough time to give her a fair chance of having any real conversations.
But there were two things about Carol I didn’t know back then.
The first was obvious within minutes of starting to work together with the SSi Method. Carol has an unusually strong working memory, and the stronger your working memory, the easier the SSi Method feels. She was romping through the lessons, and clearly enjoying the challenge. As she started to say longer and longer sentences, I became more and more confident that she was going to do brilliantly.
At the end of the first day, I strolled back to my hotel with a sense of rising optimism. I was still nervous about how little time we had, but I could already see that Carol was going to achieve something quite unusual.
Over the next few weeks
I found out the second important thing about Carol. Carol takes challenges seriously.
She was meant to put in about fifteen hours of self-guided learning with our app before our second day. I’m certain she did a lot more than that – once Carol decides she wants to achieve something, she does not hold back.
For our second day, Carol was kind enough to travel up to my neck of the woods, just outside Caernarfon. I thought we would be doing more of the same – working through the SSi Method, and maybe moving on to some initial listening exercises.
I was completely wrong.
Carol was ready for conversation practice. All the work she’d done in the app had paid off dramatically, and we spent the day like a couple of friends on an unexpected bank holiday.
Sitting the living room, taking the dog for a walk with Carol in her bright yellow puffer coat, popping down into town, and talking and talking and talking in Welsh.
I knew that she’d do wonderfully in her 4 days of filming, and I wasn’t wrong.
As you can see for yourself below:
Carol’s journey was unusual
Not because of the strength of her working memory, and her enormous commitment to the work. Not everyone would be able to go as far or as fast as Carol, in so little time. But it’s also true that the SSi Method is designed precisely to allow this kind of high performance under pressure – anyone who puts the time in will reach the same results, even if it takes them a little longer than 2 days.