How micro-immersion can help you become a Welsh speaker

Aran Jones Author, SaySomethingIn

I was ten minutes early for my first session with a new Welsh learner last week, so I took the path down to the beach to sit in the spring sunshine on a huge piece of old driftwood.

I always feel as if arriving early is a bit rude, so I’d rather meditate for a few minutes than knock on a door when people might still be busy.

It was a particularly interesting first session. I got to meet a lovely dog, which is always one of my favourite things to do, and we talked about meditation and expectations and the ups and downs of language learning, and I actually managed to listen quite a lot (it’s not one of my natural strengths, but it’s something I’m always working on).

When our time was up, I wanted to offer a little exercise – something to keep the momentum going, something we’d be able to look back at in our next session and see if it had been helpful.

I chose one of the most simple but powerful things you can do when you’re learning a language.

I asked my new student – who is starting more or less from scratch – to say five sentences in Welsh to herself every day. Just five, and they don’t have to be long sentences, either. Whatever comes to mind.

She’s going to be using the SaySomethinginWelsh app as well, but there’s a very important difference between saying something in Welsh when you’re given a prompt in English, and saying something in Welsh when you haven’t been told what to say.

I think of it as micro-immersion. For a moment, you’re not leaning to and fro between Welsh and English, you’re just existing entirely in Welsh.

When you start doing it, even if you’ve been learning Welsh for quite a long time, it usually feels unexpectedly difficult. You might be able to turn a 12 word English sentence into a Welsh sentence, but coming up with something yourself? It’s so difficult I think it must actually involve some subtly different neural networks.

But the difference it makes can be extraordinary.

Setting Welsh free

If you’re an absolute beginner, your five sentences will be extremely limited. That’s fine. Maybe you’re saying ‘Dwi angen siarad’, ‘Dwi wedi siarad’, ‘Dwi’n siarad Cymraeg’, ‘Dwi’n dysgu siarad’ and ‘Dwi’n dysgu siarad Cymraeg’. Simple, but perfect.

Even at this early stage, what you’re doing is incredibly important. You’re building the capacity to find and use the Welsh words that you’re learning – you’re taking them out of the classroom and setting them free, and that’s the beginning of all the really fun stuff.

The key, though, is to make this a daily habit.

If you do, you’ll discover something rather magical. As long as you don’t try to force it, as long as you settle happily for the first five sentences that come into your mind, you’ll discover that your brain will start to raise the bar, gradually, when it’s ready.

New words that you’ve learnt will start to occur to you as part of a sentence when you’re doing your five sentences, and when they’ve cropped up a few times, they’ll become something you can use easily whenever you want to.

The sentences will get longer over time, as well. If you start with two or three words, in a few weeks of daily sentences you’ll find yourself thinking of six or seven word sentences more and more often. And it won’t stop there – as you keep on hearing longer and longer phrases in the app, you’ll start to realise that you can build some of them in your daily sentences.

The next stage…

Eventually, this will bring all the words you learn into your active Welsh – the Welsh that you can use quickly enough to get into conversations – and you’ll be ready to make a small but significant change to your micro-immersion exercise.

You’ll be ready to switch from saying five sentences every day to something more difficult and more fun.

Spending five minutes every day talking to someone in Welsh, and only in Welsh.

Just five minutes.

This takes a bit more organising, of course. You need to find someone – or a team of people – willing to give you that five minutes. But even if you can’t manage every day, once or twice a week of five minutes in Welsh will still make a dramatic difference.

That’s the important thing about micro-immersion. Whenever your brain gets used to one level, it will be ready to push on to the next. When five minutes a day in Welsh feels easy, you won’t need me to suggest that you should try ten – you’ll just want to do it automatically.

And the places that might lead you are fascinating.

When my session was finished, I made my goodbyes (including a last hug with the fabulous dog) and walked up the street to the main road. A few minutes later, a red van pulled up, and I hopped into the passenger seat.

The driver was another Welsh learner, and we were off to Llanelli to spend the afternoon working on voiceovers for the educational videos that had been made out of his successful TV series.

As Bilbo Baggins said” “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Saying five sentences a day in Welsh is a very similar thing.

I warmly recommend it.

Find out more about SaySomethingIn here.