Practice and the art of learning Welsh

Aran Jones Author, SaySomethingIn

I’ve been trying to get my son to practise French. It’s classic helicopter parenting – he’s been very clear that he doesn’t want to learn French, and I’ve been equally clear that he’s bloody well going to.

If I’ve got to have teenagers in the house, I want at least one thing we can talk about that isn’t connected to a PlayStation.

To be fair, he and I probably both have room for improvement in our attitudes.

He won’t listen to me explaining why practice matters so much (even though I know some useful things about it).

Oh, he pretends, sometimes, but not very convincingly. So I thought I’d write an article about it instead.

Yes, you’re filling in as a substitute teenager for a father who just wants to be heard.

I hope you’re better at pretending to listen.

Abracadabra

As I’ve told him several times, the important – and rather magical! – thing is that everything we do can be practice, if we just notice that we’re doing it.

Every moment, every choice we make, if we pay attention to it, the brain accepts it all gratefully as input, and it gets consistently better at whatever it is we’re choosing to do.

As long as we’re paying attention, though. If we do things automatically, without thinking about them – like washing up, or driving to work, or writing articles for Nation (ignore that last one, please) – the brain packs that stuff off to the basal ganglia for processing.

You know that feeling of missing a turn when you’re driving, because you were on automatic pilot? That’s what it feels like when your brain is using the basal ganglia.

The basal ganglia are no use for learning, though. They’re just rinse and repeat. To get value out of doing things more than once, we need to be up in the prefrontal cortex – and that means that we need to be paying attention.

The good news is that paying attention itself can be practised – and the more we practise paying attention, the better we get at it, the more easily we can pay attention to whatever we’re doing, and the better we’ll get at everything we’re doing.

This has some rather worrying consequences, though.

Pathways

If we get angry, we’re practising being angry. If we get bored or frustrated, we’re practising being bored or frustrated.

If we make sarcastic comments to a father who’s just trying to help us, we get better at making sarcastic comments to innocent fathers (instead of getting better at French).

If we let our life slide into unhappy patterns – niggling arguments, negative self-talk, blaming other people, worrying about the future – those grooves will run deeper and deeper the longer we continue to practise them.

As Radiohead sang, ‘you do it to yourself’.

On the other hand – more happily – we can practise the good things as well. Strangely enough, we don’t usually talk about them as things to practise – happiness, kindness, joy, love, optimism, compassion – everything our brain is involved with, we can practise.

Unless you already know how to do it, though, it’s not easy to decide to practise being happy for five minutes every day. Most of us, even when we’re paying attention, can’t just snap our fingers and feel happy.

What we can do, though, is spend five minutes thinking compassionately about other people. Weirdly, unexpectedly, but very consistently, it won’t take long before we notice that spending five minutes every day thinking kindly about other people is a very reliable short-cut to feeling happy ourselves.

When you notice that you can feel happy whenever you want to just by spending a few moments thinking kindly about other people, you’ll start to experience moments of joy.

When you can practise feeling joyful for five minutes every day, you’ll discover that it makes everything else – absolutely everything else, even teaching French to teenagers – feel much easier.

I haven’t sold my son on this yet.

I blame his prefrontal cortex – it doesn’t finish growing until people are about 24 or 25, so I’ve probably got about a decade to go before he’ll make an effort with French, and even then I’ll have to bribe him with trips to Paris (or a steady supply of pain au chocolat).

Out is through

If you’re learning Welsh at the moment, though, and especially if your prefrontal cortex has finished growing, all of this transfers very straightforwardly.

What are you finding most difficult with Welsh at the moment? It’s usually either managing to say things yourself, or understanding what other people are saying. It’s worth breaking those two up and dealing with them separately.

If your main challenge right now is managing to say things yourself – yes, exactly. Spend time every day practising speaking. You can even do it in private – five minutes a day practising saying whatever you can think of out loud. The more you do it, the better you’ll get.

If your main challenge is understanding other people – same deal. Five minutes every day listening to other people speak Welsh (even if it’s just a podcast, and even if you don’t understand most of it) will give your brain what it needs to get better.

And – of course – if you also spend five minutes every day practising happiness just before you do your Welsh, you’ll enjoy the journey even more. What’s not to love?

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