Are you good enough at learning languages to learn Welsh?

Aran Jones Author, SaySomethingIn

When you read that headline, you immediately fall into one of two groups.

Either you think to yourself sure, I can speak one or two other languages fluently already, I’ll have no problems with Welsh if I decide to learn it.

Or you think nope, I didn’t get anywhere good with French or Spanish or Welsh at school, so I’m just not good at learning languages.

In fact, if you’d been in the first group, you probably wouldn't even have read past the headline - so I’m going to presume you’re in the second group. You’re in good company - it’s the group most people in Wales belong to, and it’s certainly the group I used to belong to until I became a Welsh speaker.

I was absolutely certain that I was no good at learning languages. And I had plenty of evidence, too.

I didn’t manage to learn German when I lived in Germany as a child (the nuns and I couldn’t quite see eye to eye, philosophically as well as physically).

I didn’t manage to learn Portuguese when we moved to the Algarve (I got as far as memorising ‘That’s not your boat’ and ‘There’s a beast in the rubbish bin’, but that doesn’t make for sparkling conversations).

Then I didn’t manage to learn German (again) or French at school, and I didn’t manage to learn Sinhalese or Tamil in Sri Lanka. Disheartened, I didn’t even try to learn Malay, but I made a serious effort to learn Shona in Zimbabwe, and failed miserably. I tried even harder to learn Arabic while I was in Dubai, and failed even more miserably, and then I managed to squeeze in a quick failure to learn Italian on my way home to Wales.

So when you think to yourself ‘I was no good at French or Welsh at school, I definitely couldn’t learn Welsh now’ - oh, boy, do I sympathise.

I also know you’re completely wrong.

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"It wasn't me"

Despite all my failures - despite all the signs that I was worse than rubbish at learning languages - I become a confident Welsh speaker.

I wish I’d known this when I was younger, but it turned out after all that the problem wasn’t me. The problem wasn’t my brain, or how it worked. The problem was how languages are taught - all the rules you have to memorise, all the long lists of vocabulary, all the complicated stuff about when you say it this way, when you say it that way, all the different ways you can be wrong (and how bad it is to be wrong).

At some point, I always got bored, and once I got bored it was done and dusted.

It turns out, though, that you don’t need any of that stuff.

You just need to make sure that all the words you learn work really well with each other, so that you can get lots of practice using them - and when you do that, even just a few hours can give you the ability to say quite a few different useful things in your new language.

When you do that, instead of being boring, it becomes fun. Once it’s fun, it’s easy to keep on giving your brain the exposure and practice it needs to use the language confidently.

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Human after all

Considering how many years I spent failing to learn languages, and considering how many people genuinely believe that they’re not good at languages, I find the underlying truth quite distressing.

It makes me feel frustrated and a little angry.

All healthy brains are actually superb at learning languages.

It may even be the single thing they do better than anything else.

It may be the skill that, more than any other, makes us human.

If your brain is given the right language input, it will over time produce the right language output. It’s just how brains work.

That’s what didn’t happen for you at school, and that’s why you came out of school unable to speak two or three languages with real confidence.

But if you turn that into a belief that your brain doesn’t work properly, that there’s something particularly bad about your brain which will stop you from becoming a Welsh speaker - you’re letting the things which didn’t work for you at school work as a glass ceiling for the rest of your life. And there’s no need for that.

With the right input, your brain will produce the right output.

And you can test that for yourself in just an hour or two with SaySomethinginWelsh.

Yes, fair call, I’m a little biased. Okay, more than a little biased. But also, I’m a multiple, serial language learning failure, and I wrote the SaySomethinginWelsh course deliberately to try and give other people the successful experience I (finally!) had with Welsh.

That’s what I’d like you to remember: it was never your fault.

And you absolutely CAN become a confident Welsh speaker.

Find out more about SaySomethingIn here.