Want to speak Welsh? Make MORE mistakes (it’s a superpower)

Aran Jones Author, SaySomethingIn

People who learnt languages at school usually don’t like making mistakes.

In fact, people who went to school at all really don’t like making mistakes. There’s a whole load of ugly scar tissue in there. Everybody wants to be right, nobody wants to be wrong.

There’s a massive problem with that in language learning, though.

Your brain needs evidence to learn. The more evidence you give your brain, the more it will learn. And, in essence, it learns by noticing differences and similarities. That’s true for all learning – but there’s another, even more important, factor in language learning.

Speaking

Speaking is the trigger for language learning. You can learn as many words, as many grammar rules, as you like, but if you don’t get out there and speak, you won’t become a Welsh speaker (or a speaker of any other language!).

But speaking feels very risky when you’re learning a language.

It feels full of all sorts of opportunities to get things wrong, and it gives us a gut feeling that we’re going to be embarrassed, other people are going to laugh at us, we’re going to feel stupid.

Speaking is such an important part of our identity. How we speak can make us belong or not belong – it can give us status or take away status from us – it can make us feel adult and competent or it can make us feel as if we’re being held back and made voiceless.

That means we lose a huge amount immediately the moment we begin to speak in a language we’re still learning. We instinctively feel as though we don’t belong, we feel lower status, we feel almost as if we’ve reverted to childhood and can’t operate like an adult any more.

No wonder people feel stressed about it!

But look at how dangerous that stress is.

We feel stressed about speaking Welsh, so we avoid speaking it. We say fewer things in Welsh, and our brains get less evidence to learn the language. When our brains get less evidence, they learn less – and when they learn less, they want to protect us from difficult situations, so they make us feel more stressed about speaking Welsh. Uh-oh, feedback loop.

The solution

How do we solve this? We have to break it right at the very beginning.

We have to make mistakes a central part of the learning process. If you learn by testing yourself with flash cards (or by playing with the SaySomethinginWelsh app!), you’ll get plenty of opportunities to make mistakes.

And then you prevent that from leading into the bad feedback loop by celebrating them.

Yes, seriously. Celebrating them. Which means you need to understand exactly what they are.

Every time you say something in Welsh and then you or hear something different from what you said, your brain has just been given extra evidence. In fact, if you notice the mistake (you’d be surprised how often people don’t!) that means something even more amazing. It means your brain has held what you were trying to say, what you said, and then what you read or heard all in your working memory for long enough to compare them and notice a difference.

That moment of noticing a difference?

That is literally the moment of learning.

If you can change your mindset so that you realise the moment of noticing a mistake is actually the moment of learning, then you can build a different feedback loop. A better feedback loop.

You feel good when you’re learning. So now that you can identify that moment, you want more of it. So you take more opportunities to speak Welsh. And that gives your brain more evidence, so it learns faster, and you feel more confident about speaking Welsh. Now you’re on a roll.

MisTAKE

Maybe it will help you make the switch if you think a little about the word mistake itself.

Let me write that differently.

Think about misTAKE.

You know that films and television series need a lot of TAKES, don’t you? It’s completely normal – it’s more than that, it’s absolutely unavoidable. Actors do the same scene, say the same words, over and over again. And then editors sit and look and listen to all the options, and choose the ones they think will work best. That’s how the creative process works.

So every misTAKE is actually a TAKE. Another step towards creating something genuinely worthwhile.

The more TAKES you commit to, the faster you build, the sooner you become a Welsh speaker.

If you don’t believe me (which is fair enough!) just take a look at Scott Quinnell. I told him once – just once! – that he shouldn’t worry about making mistakes – he said ‘Fine, I won’t’ and he’s never looked back. Right now, he’s filming the third series of his own show on S4C – all thanks to his willingness to throw himself into the messy thick of it with Welsh.

That’s enough of me preaching. Why don’t you step away from the screen, and see how long it takes you before you can make a mistake in Welsh? And if you manage it in less than 5 minutes, do leave a comment for me to applaud you…

Find out more about SaySomethingIn here.