What learning Welsh reveals about the power of the brain

Aran Jones Author, SaySomethingIn

Quite some time ago, I was stuck in a small conference room, bored to tears, listening to a tech company try to sell their software to the county council I worked for at the time.

The meeting was, inevitably, running late, and I was day-dreaming about jumping out of the window.

Then I perked up – one of the sales guys had just said he was an Arabic speaker.

I was still fairly fresh back from Dubai, where I’d been one of the world’s least successful learners of Arabic.

Oh, I’d tried – evening classes, homework, I’d even spent a month in Cairo one summer doing a full time course and living with an old man who didn’t speak any English.

My Arabic was so bad I literally don’t know anything about that old man apart from the fact that he didn’t speak any English.

But it was interesting to hear an English tech salesman in Wales talking about speaking Arabic, so I started listening.

And I started trying to remember the Arabic for ‘where did you learn Arabic?’ At the end of the session, I asked him, and he looked horrified. ‘It was a long time ago, I haven’t used it for ages, I’m really rusty,’ he said in English.

That was my contribution to the debriefing. ‘I don’t know what their tech is like, but I do know he was lying about being an Arabic speaker.’ They didn’t get the contract.

But on my drive home, I found myself remembering other little bits of Arabic. I’d learnt quite a lot of words, I just didn’t know how to put them together.

Then, for no particular reason, I remembered the word for ‘humidity’ – رطوبة – and then I found myself wondering how on earth I could know the Arabic for humidity but not be able to have a conversation, while not having the faintest idea what the Welsh for humidity was, but having a job where I worked through the medium of Welsh.

A stressful pattern…

Several years later, I’d followed that line of thought quite a long way. I’d written and published a Welsh course, and I was invited to Cardiff University to give a presentation about how the course worked.

‘We think your approach might break some of our theories,’ they’d said, ‘so we’d like to understand a bit more about it.’ At the end of the presentation, there were no questions – for one brief and happy moment.

Then one of their senior academics got up and said ‘All very interesting, but it doesn’t answer our question about why any of this works.’

Yes, it was slightly embarrassing.

And then even worse afterwards, when she said ‘Maybe you could come back next year and try again?’ I began a stressful pattern of visiting Cardiff once a year, panic reading on the train everything I could about language learning, and then trying to justify my approach in front of sceptical students.

And that was how I started to fall in love with the brain.

It turned out, eventually, that our course had by accident created a strange combination of several very well studied techniques for memory formation.

Not just for words, though, but for how they fit together – the missing ingredient in my own experience with Arabic.

The more I read about memory, the more I discovered that we were still in the process of understanding neuroplasticity – the amazing fact that the brain keeps on changing for as long as you’re alive.

For most of the twentieth century, we thought of the brain as being a bit like a computer – you grow up, you’re either clever or you’re not, you learn well or you don’t, and then you leave school and that’s the brain you’ve got for the rest of your life.

All of which is completely wrong.

The right input

Your brain changes all the time. Every moment of the day, your synapses are changing – becoming stronger or weaker – and new synapses are forming.

Which means that whatever you pay attention to, you become better at.

If you left school believing that you’re clever, this is easy to accept. If you left school believing that you’re not clever, it’s much harder to believe in yourself. But it’s still true: you have effectively limitless capacity to learn.

If you found it hard to learn new things at school, that’s because they weren’t being taught in ways that worked for your brain. All brains are capable of changing, all brains are capable of learning, if they’re given the right input.

To be fair to schools, it’s a huge challenge to find the right input for all students – but we could do a much better job of letting everyone know that they’ve got the capacity to learn, if they find the right way to do it.

Education should change enormously over the next ten or twenty years. More than it’s changed in the previous hundred, perhaps. The next generation of children should have far more confidence in themselves.

But if you’ve already left school, that doesn’t mean it’s too late for you. Maybe the only missing ingredient is for you to believe in the remarkable power of your own brain. Learning Welsh is as good a way as any to discover what you’re really capable of, but anything else you’re interested in would work just as well.

If you could learn anything (which you can!) what would you choose?

It might be the most important question of all

Find out more about SaySomethingIn here.