Everyone at SaySomething loves hearing what our learners have to say about every aspect of our spoken language app – our own community is vital to us.
We actively encourage all our students to share their experiences on Trustpilot and to be in continual communication with us through our forums.
We invite our most engaged and devoted language pupils to participate in our new language development by testing and giving open feedback on our drafts for new spoken language courses. As a company, this close learner involvement is essential.
SaySomethingin will continue to rely heavily on all channels for feedback and ongoing interactions with our learners long into the future,
In light of this approach, we were thrilled (and a little shocked) that this month two of our community had shared their experiences of learning to speak Welsh with SaySomethingin in press pieces.
Both articles, which were very personal and concentrated on unique situations, align with our goal of preparing anyone who needs spoken language to feel really part of a new community for family, historical or business reasons.
Use these links to read the two articles for yourself:
Do contact us yourself if you ever have your own questions, comments and ideas about spoken language learning – what you say to us is how we improve our offer to you.
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.
You don’t need six degrees of separation to get from one Welsh speaker to another – it’s rarely more than one or two. And sometimes the smallest villages are connected to the largest stories – it can be just a hop and a skip from rural Gwynedd to Hollywood or Radio 1. Here are a couple of the threads which have woven around my family and the village I grew up in.
Eleri was raised in Llanaelhaearn, a small village on the Llŷn Peninsula which sits below Tre’r Ceiri mountain, atop of which you’ll find one of the best preserved Iron Age hillforts in the UK.
It is the village where Robert Lambert Gapper was born – the sculptor, art lecturer, and designer of the Urdd Logo. It is also the village which was the centre of the largest recorded earthquake in Britain which measured 5.4 on the Richter scale – it took place at 6.56am on the morning of 19 July 1984. I was twelve at the time.
Eleri’s family ran the bakery and the Glanrhyd shop on one side of the main road in Llanaelhaearn. My grandparents and my aunt ran the corner shop, Voelas Stores, on the opposite side.
Eleri attended the village school with her sister, her cousin, my older sisters, and my cousins. I attended some years later with my brother after an impassioned series of marches and protests in the early 70s were successful in keeping the small school open. It survived until the summer of 2020 when its doors finally closed for the last time.
Yes, we all knew each other in Llanaelhaearn, and those not related by blood or marriage were still aunts and uncles – even to this day I remain unsure as to who’s officially related and who isn’t.
This August I saw Eleri again for the first time in many years. You see, 50 years ago in August 1972, my cousin Eric (from Voelas Stores), married Eleri’s cousin Elaine (from Glanrhyd). Eleri and her sister Margaret were their older bridesmaids and I (six months old) was their little flower girl. Last month, my cousins decided to share their 50th wedding anniversary celebrations with their extended family and so we all came together.
That one afternoon wasn’t long enough for all the stories we had to share – stories from a small village community, stories fuelled by the albums of old photographs that were being passed from table to table.
I met Eleri’s daughter, Sioned, for the first time that day – but her son, Owain, was unable to attend – I’d heard a rumour that he was busy feasting in the underground kingdom of Khazad-dûm.
Owain began acting when he was 11 years old, playing the role of Aled Shaw in the popular series Rownd a Rownd. Beyond that Welsh soap series based in the village of Porthaethwy on Ynys Môn, Owain’s career went from strength to strength, and now he’s playing a role in one of the greatest stories ever told.
On Friday evening, our family, like millions of others around the world, sat down to watch the first two episodes of the new Amazon Prime series, The Rings Of Power – and to see Owain play the role of the dwarf, Prince Durin IV. Although Owain himself never lived in Llanaelhaearn, I’d like to think that the shadow of Tre’r Ceiri where his mother was raised has in some way provided inspiration for his mountain dwarf ways.
I think that one reason why I love the peoples and communities in The Lord Of The Rings is because in some ways it reminds me of my upbringing in a small, rural Welsh community, and the inventive ways in which that community in the 70s and 80s pulled together to support each other.
The protests and marches to keep our village school open were just the beginning. At a time when adversity was hitting hard, when jobs were scarce, public transport insufficient, and not many households able to afford owning cars, our small village needed a lifeline.
In 1970, Carl Iwan Clowes, his wife Dorothi, and their son Dafydd Ieuan moved to Bryn Meddyg, the doctor’s house in Llanaelhaearn. Carl was a socially conscious GP who became very aware of the economic decline in the area and was very keen to make a difference beyond his medical practice. Carl became friends with my father and along with a few others they set up a village association with a view to improving the community. In the early 70s, Carl and my father took a trip to Oileán Chléire (Cape Clear), an island off the coast of County Cork. There they saw how the islanders had formed a cooperative to encourage self-sufficiency, and create employment in various ways to strengthen the local community. As a result of their fact-finding mission, Antur Aelhaearn was registered in Llanaelhaearn as the UK’s very first village co-operative. Locals were able to buy shares in the scheme for £1, and the funds raised allowed them to start home-grown pottery and knitwear businesses.
Here’s a short film from 1978 about Antur Aelhaearn – I’m the little redhead sitting on my sister’s knee as she draws and paints.
After the success of Antur Aelhaearn (or the Antur as we called it), Carl became the catalyst for the repair and regeneration of the old abandoned village of Porth y Nant. He set up a trust in order to buy the village, with the dream of converting it into a centre for Welsh language education.
A lot of hard work and financial support from various grants secured Carl’s dream. Today Nant Gwrtheyrn offers both residential Cymraeg courses and online taster lessons for learners of all levels as well as being a very popular wedding venue. It also has an interesting visitor’s centre, a cafe with one of the best views in Wales, some stunning coastal walks, and is a wonderful place to stay.
During Carl and Dorothy’s time in Llanaelhaearn, they had four children. Two of them, Dafydd Ieuan and Cian Ciarán, became members of the successful and very imaginative Welsh rock band Super Furry Animals. But it’s not all about the music; much like their father, Cian, and Dafydd have always kept environmental and welfare matters close to their hearts.
Carl, very sadly, passed away on the 4 December 2021 at the age of 77 – he still had so much more to give.
Llanaelhaearn isn’t much to look at as you drive by. In fact you hardly notice it. It doesn’t boast any notable architecture and both Glanrhyd and Voelas Stores closed their doors many, many years ago.
But all is not lost – Antur Aelhaearn is still going strong, as is a new community village garden cooperative. If you do ever find yourself in the area, please stop to see the wonderful mural painted on the side of the Antur building, which pays tribute to the creative people woven into the tapestry of this unassuming village.
Each time I pass through, I’m reminded of the incredible history this little village has, and the outstanding people it has inspired. And yes, Carl did get to see that beautiful mural before he left us.
