It’s nearly forty years since I first moved to Wales, so I’ve decided it’s time I stopped learning Welsh. This doesn’t mean I’m giving up on the language – indeed, rather the opposite, for I’ve spoken more Cymraeg in the last month than the previous four decades. If you haven’t yet twigged, the operative word in the sentence above is ‘spoken’!
And that’s because I’ve realised that all the books and grammar tables and YouTube tutorials can only take you so far. In my case, they do worse and fry my brain as I try to decipher and translate in a literal way. Which of course is not how things are, or how we make progress, in the real world.
Instead, I’ve taken to simply speaking out loud, and seeking every opportunity to give it a go, make mistakes and try again… The ladies who run my local café laugh that I speak Welsh with a bit of French thrown in – but they are so welcoming and delighted that I try. It turns out I also have friend in the next village who’s been silently learning for years – and who desperately wanted someone to practice with!
She too makes lots of mistakes, but together we’re improving.
It strikes me that this approach has wider application, including for our time in the mountains. I’m not suggesting we should tackle, say, rock climbing, in quite the same way but there comes a point in any activity when we must commit and risk a little failure. All the books in the world can’t teach us what it’s like to pull on a hold, move freely upward, and sense the ground falling away below us.
I‘ve no doubt that, somewhere, there are doctorates on the best balance between classroom and experiential learning. But I’m not going to read them and certainly not in relation to Cymraeg. Instead, I’m getting on with the ‘doing’, because forty years is far too long to garner the courage to begin.
Wela I di ar yr mynydd…
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A version of this post appeared in the AAC(UK) newsletter, of which I am editor
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