Zen and the art of language learning

Aran Jones Author, SaySomethingIn

There’s a moment we have to pay particularly close attention to in the early stages with a new learner – when we’re working one-on-one or when we’re talking to someone about their early experiences on our forum.

It’s the moment when the prompt is given in English, the learner says something in Welsh, and then they hear something different in the model Welsh recordings.

In other words, what most people call a ‘mistake’.

Maybe the prompt is ‘I want to speak Welsh’ and the learner says ‘Dwi isio dysgu Cymraeg’ and then hears the Welsh voice say ‘Dwi isio siarad Cymraeg’. We might also call it the ‘kick yourself’ moment.

There are two problems with this that I’ve struggled to solve for people over the years.

Making mistakes

The first is comparatively easy. The learner needs to understand that the word ‘mistake’ is the wrong word for this experience.

They need to know that for them to notice the difference, their brain has held the original prompt, their response, and then the model response all in working memory at the same time, and compared them, and noticed a difference.

The right word for that is ‘learning’.

These are the moments when the brain is getting the input it needs to improve its model of the language, and the learner is getting better (and actually practising the word we want, ‘siarad’, and the word we’re not looking for, ‘dysgu’, at the same time).

Explaining that important difference is not difficult. Look, I just did it! It only takes a few words.

Getting people to accept it, though – oh, that’s a whole other thing.

‘Yes,’ they say, ‘I get it, fine.’ And then they ‘make a mistake’ again, and they’re right back into feeling frustrated and convincing themselves that they’re not doing very well. The sheer force of their emotional response completely overrides their intellectual understanding of what’s happening.

And I’m stuck there, sitting in front of them, responsible for helping them achieve success – but instead of solving anything to do with the language, or how our method works, I’ve got to find a way to help them deal with their emotions.

I used to think ‘Oh, great, you’re having an emotional difficulty with this. That’s above my pay grade. We need to get you a therapist.’

Being in the moment

Then – in a way which would subsequently turn out to be quite useful, although it wasn’t much fun at the time – I went through some significant trauma in my own life, had to see a therapist myself, and started really working on my own emotions. In my early 50s, at a time when I genuinely thought I was already meant to have figured life out.

It led me, eventually, down the path of Zen meditation – a path which winds around and around the mountain, always bringing you back to the same core moments with a gradually deepening understanding of them.

One day, I noticed the overlap.

Zen tells you, above all else, to be in the moment. If you spend enough time in the moment, you become clearly aware of the difference between your noticing mind and your thinking and feeling mind. Every time you step consciously into the moment, you’re stepping out of thought and feeling. The more you do it, the better you get at it.

So that moment when a learner feels frustrated and upset because what they said wasn’t what they heard is a deeply Zen moment.

Frustration, being upset – these are emotions. Painful, unhelpful emotions.

Apparently, emotions will usually pass through our bodies in about 90 seconds, unless we make a story out of them. So what do we always do? Yes, of course, we always make a story out of them. ‘I’m not doing as well as I should,’ ‘I’m not clever enough’, ‘I’m not going to learn Welsh like this’. And those stories dig into our thinking mind – they form actual neurological circuits, particularly when we overthink them – and hang on for dear life, causing a lot of damage in the process.

But the solution is simple.

Be in the moment.

Enlightenment

And by a useful coincidence, our method requires you to be ready almost immediately for a new prompt, and a new effort to say something in Welsh.

So that’s what I focus on now.

I tell people that if they’re having any difficult emotions, the right thing to do is to bring their focus immediately back to the next prompt they hear. I tell them, correctly, that the more they do this, the better they will get at it. I tell them, correctly, that if they can solve this key issue, they will definitely become confident Welsh speakers.

I don’t usually tell them that I also think they’re taking their first steps on the road to enlightenment.

If my theory is right – which of course it might not be! – this should also mean that Zen monks should be particularly good at learning with the SSi Method. I can’t even begin to express how much I want to test that idea. It might have to wait until another article, though.

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