Tirlun

About me

My name is Joe. I was born and raised on the North Wales coast. I am an adult learner of Welsh, and can also speak Mandarin, and a little bit of a lot of other languages.

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In my early 20s, I got a scholarship to learn Chinese, then did a BA in it. I spent some time in China working in digital marketing, before returning home to study for an MBA and to learn Welsh properly. It's still a work in progress.

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Just before lockdown, but after graduating with my MBA, I tried to create a business that used statistics to optimise the language learning process. Covid hit, we didn't get the investment needed, so it didn't work out. Following this I had a string of varied jobs.

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Last year, I got sick of not doing something with my passion for languages, history and culture, and decided to create Tirlun. I noticed that people absolutely loved content that explained place names, especially for places where many people no longer speak the language of the areas they live, but also noticed this content was often embedded in longer programmes or was slightly inaccessible. It seemed to me that short 1-3 minute videos are the perfect format for talking about place names, and I couldn't find anyone else doing it, so I decided to give it a go with some place names around my home.

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This 'content strategy' (sorry for the marketing speak) turned out to be quite popular, so now I am trying to make a living out of this.

Learning Welsh has been a transformative experience in terms of how I connect with the land around me, and I want to share that feeling with as many people as possible.​

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Aside from making these videos, I like long-distance walking (thank goodness, given how much of that I have to do to film these places!), learning languages, trying to learn to cynghanneddu, and spending time with my partner and her frog.