Part of Cardiff University, Cardiff Business School is well known for its dedication to global perspective, innovation, and academic quality.

Being one of the top business schools in the UK, it draws a varied group of international applicants every year.

For the past two years, SSi has been chosen as one of the subjects for their yearly postgraduate students’ “Live Business Project.”

In this scheme, which is the last in their study program, students examine and evaluate a real-world business scenario before producing a report and giving a presentation in person.

The cohort for this year just finished reviewing language learning technologies and e-learning, paying close attention to the SSi methodology.

Hearing the opinions, suggestions, and ideas of a dedicated group of young academics from locations well away from Wales was fascinating. The original perspective led to some great insights.

Everyone at SSi expresses gratitude to the group tutor and the entire Cardiff Business School staff for allowing us to access such a fantastic group of students.
Finally, we send our best wishes to the entire project team and hope they gain the qualifications they need to progress in their chosen fields.”

Initiatives aimed at promoting and enhancing the use of Welsh in schools are crucial for preserving and fostering the language’s future.

With this very much in mind, SaySomethingin, (SSi) has been working closely with a selection of primary and secondary schools as well as the National Centre for Welsh, since 2022, to test our Welsh language resources in the school setting.

We had several key objectives with this initiative…

• Increase the spoken proficiency of students in Welsh, ensuring that they can use the language confidently in both academic and social contexts. 
• Enhance the cultural understanding and appreciation of Welsh heritage among students. 
• Integrate Welsh more thoroughly into the school curriculum and daily life, making it a natural part of students’ educational experiences.

The pilot was a voluntary initiative rather than a mandated one and uptake levels in different schools have varied. However, all schools made use of the resource and feedback has been very positive across the board. 

Results have shown that regular use of the SSi resource in the classroom has led to a marked increase in pupils’ confidence and use of Welsh.

Schools have been particularly encouraged by how groups of pupils used SSi resources to help each other, with weaker students receiving support from the wider group.

Findings such as this have inspired us to develop our resource to improve group uptake and comparison, support teacher analysis and help attain approved academic standards.

Based on this work, we now believe there is an opportunity for a fuller roll-out, with clear guidance for schools supported by the relevant education authorities.

We would like to thank all the schools that have been part of this pilot and we look forward to sharing our Welsh language system developments with you all in the future.

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. 

Catrin and I are just back from a week in Paris with the kids, and I’ve been forcibly reminded of how tough – and then how magical – the journey from intermediate to advanced is. For me, intermediate means that you can hold a conversation, but you’re still conscious of your limitations, and it can still feel like quite hard work sometimes – and you can’t easily follow radio or TV or podcasts.

That’s almost exactly where I am with my French – I can have extended and enjoyable conversations in a 1-on-1 environment (which mostly means down the pub with my friend Dave) but I’ll often need to ask first language speakers to slow down or repeat themselves, and I can’t follow podcasts in any detail. 

Thrown in at the deep end with Parisian taxi drivers, that meant a range of experiences – when I was feeling high energy and cheerful, I had some interesting conversations about Paris and politics and colonialism and the joys of being a parent. When I was feeling tired, or not sure how friendly the driver was, it meant some fairly extended silences (with bits of Welsh with Catrin and the kids in the back, just to make sure the driver knew I wasn’t being silent in English ;-)).

It’s a roller-coaster of a learning stage. I came out of some of those taxi rides absolutely buzzing with enthusiasm and excitement, wondering how soon we could arrange to move to Paris permanently. After the mostly silent ones, though, I felt frustrated and self-critical, and grumpy that I couldn’t see any magic buttons I could press to just BE a French speaker already, without all the bloody effort. 

By the end of the week, though, my main sensation was of being tantalisingly close to being able to slide into Frenchness – and experience all the fascinating cultural shifts that open up with that linguistic sidestep – in the same way as I can move between Welsh and English. 

That last little step, though, is all about building a large enough database of listening recognition – and I haven’t found any short-cuts for that yet. It took me about a year in Welsh of listening to Radio Cymru for about an hour and a half in the car every day of the week (as well as having more and more conversations with more and more people). I can’t increase my number of daily French conversations in the same way (what with not living in Paris yet, and having a post-lockdown hatred of Zoom calls). I think I’ve got a new level of motivation to do an hour or two every day listening to French podcasts, though, fuelled by my love for Paris and how much we would all like to be able to visit more often. It’s going to be interesting to see how that works out over the next year or so.

What’s more, the kids seem up for putting in the hard yards with the new SSi French course, because they had a great time in Paris as well, and they could see (even without me preaching!) what a difference it would make to be able to understand the language. 

If you’re at this stage with Welsh, I sympathise with you. It’s brutal, because you won’t notice any change in your ability after listening to a podcast for an hour. You won’t even get to the end of the week having done an hour every day and suddenly notice a change. The only thing you’ll get – and it feels like a pretty small reward – is occasional moments of realising that you’d understood a sentence or two without needing to think about it. And then, agonisingly slowly, you’ll start to get three or four or five sentences in a row – and (as I keep reminding myself at the moment) that means you’re close to the tipping point. The journey from understanding five sentences in a row several times an hour to understanding almost everything is much, much shorter than the journey from understanding five words in a row to understanding five sentences in a row.

I’m sorry that we haven’t solved this for you with SSi yet, too. Really sorry. Throwing yourself into the app can get you to intermediate, and interesting conversations, very quickly – but it doesn’t help much with the leap onwards to the comfortable advanced levels of understanding that most people call fluency. 

I do have some ideas about what we might be able to do, though. We might have some test material that you could help us assess in the course of 2025. I’ll keep you posted 🙂 

But in the meantime, if you’re listening to as much Radio Cymru and as many podcasts as possible, keep going. If you bring the raw determination, the magic will eventually happen. Bonne chance!

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!?