Finding the Connection - interview with Daniel Browne

Welcome back to the Elevate blog. I'm here with Daniel Browne today. Dan, where are you in the world?

Daniel Browne: I am in the Dominican Republic. And if anyone is wondering where the heck is that, most people know where Cuba is and most people know where Puerto Rico is. We're in between those two. And it's a big island and we share it with another country called Haiti. So it's two countries on one island, in between Cuba and Puerto Rico.

How did you end up there? Was it to do with teaching or another reason?

It was actually with my wife's teaching role. She got a job here. And on a more broad level, I have a younger sister, adopted sister, and my parents adopted her from here. So she was born in the Dominican Republic. She doesn't speak Spanish. She was one year old when they got her. And I speak more Spanish than she does.

I was going to say, how long have you been there now? 

Seven years

I see. And you're an English teacher.

Yes, that's what I think I am anyway. Try to do that.

 Yeah. Are you teaching online or…

Mostly online. Yes. 95% online. I do have every now and then I have a student who's in person here. and I actually, mostly online. It's really weird or… strange how not a lot happens in person here with I guess English tutoring or… because I'm not teaching as a licensed teacher working at a school. So, as a tutor, I'm separate. So, as post covid everything has gone online and it's kind of stayed there.

 It's happened the same way for me as well. Tell me about your students. Who do you teach and what do you help them do?

It's been awesome to have students from all over China, Europe, Asia, South America. I think all five, not Australia yet, but the Americas, Europe, and Asia and seeing where, hearing about their story and learning, just hearing when we share a language. That's actually the most intriguing part for me is when there's a common any, any common commonality in the language they're learning English and when I've been able to learn Spanish and hearing how all the different sounds and…everything words how they connect across, let's say the Latin American languages, the Latin based and I can start listing out some countries for you, but where my students are but suffice it to say Europe and, and the Middle East and South America.

Tell me about students. Tell me, do you have any memorable moments with students? Any times they've had a big breakthrough with you or you've connected in some way?

Yes, just the other day he said he was having trouble visualizing or seeing the word and I said wow that's interesting… because I have something that might help you and it's called an inflection graph of a word and it says it's a graph that shows English to Spanish really. You start, over here on the left and the inflection, most English words start up here and they go down. In Spanish words, they start low and kind of do this maybe and it goes by syllable. I had to ask Chat GPT to make it for me and it took a while to finally even realize what I wanted, what the question was. And when he saw that,… he's like, okay. Yes.

And so that was encouraging that the exact thing that he was looking for was I was able to help him with. And that would get into pronunciation. Again, inflection, where you put the accent. Most people think that English doesn't have an accent. I think it's just not written right. It doesn't have the symbol and I think most languages do. And for him again me finding, yes that was my visualization too of there's got to be a way to write out see the word in a line or… graph form and wow I finally found it. Great.  That was good. And other similar moments where I change the letters around. I change the letters till I get them to say their target word. And okay, you said here's how it's spelled, which is different. I say, "Welcome to English." Unfortunately,…

Yeah. Spelling and pronunciation, different things. It's hard. Do you find …

I was just going to say and as you know, of course, there are different words between British, English, the UK,  all these different words that mean the same thing. So that's another topic though, right?

There's a whole other video! Do you find that using the student's mother tongue or native language is helpful in lesson to connect this is the difference between Spanish and English or whatever it is?

Definitely that is what I have learned. I don't know if I would be half as effective of an English teacher had I not learned Spanish. And that's kind of one of my, but the short answer is yes. It's taken me learning Spanish or any second language to appreciate my first language and then appreciate the struggle that even someone who actually needs to learn it is going through. As we call how empathy and the ability to build on their first language or again find that connection is huge, I think it's invaluable there's no number and I would almost call it a requirement or an industry standard.

I don't know, is it possible to teach a second language when you only speak one language. Is it effective? I'm not sure. Meaning, you pick a number, four to five times more effective when I have gone through the effort of learning a second language and then teaching someone else go walking with them to learn their target language, if it's our first language, etc. And then learning all the similarities between them. Every day I learn the similarity of a language that I didn't know there was the similarity. And that's when I'm excited. I'm encouraged to keep going.

I think when you're learning, you get focused on the differences and all the stuff you don't know. And it's all, especially as you know, I live in Japan and you could not get more opposite languages than English and Japanese. It's easy to focus everything's so different there's no commonalities… but then you do find things you can associate, that sounds like this word, or so that's related for me, yeah so it's a good point to focus on similar things.

And I would add for you it was even more difficult for you or others of non-Latin based, I'll say Asian languages. My wife speaks Mandarin. She still cannot write it, but she could speak it and understand it. For you Japanese, it's an entirely different. The Roman alphabet is not the alphabet. It's symbols. To me that's another level. I'm intrigued by that.

Yeah, it's different. It's hard. But yeah, if we look at similarities, it's a good way to get your mindset in the right place.

Exactly. if you can grab on that one thing, that one percent. that's similar and then it can be pleasantly surprising what happens from there.

Tell me about why do you keep being a teacher?

I like to I guess help, help others and I realized that seven years ago that, especially in a one-on-one setting I guess, I've maybe finally discovered this gift. And I guess you could say I'm still kind of new at it and I'm just trying to refine it and get better at it and become more efficient.  And maybe it came from living here and being surrounded, as you are by Japanese and whatever else is spoken there. I am to Spanish. It's being, swimming in it. You're swimming in Japanese. I'm swimming in Spanish here. And I like to think, of course I'm biased, but I like to think that I have because of this, that I have a higher empathy than someone else or any such, any teacher like us who has gone through the process of learning a language the hard way of being immersed in it. I'd like to think that we have more empathy that, maybe we think: I don't want this person to have to go through what I went through all the anger and frustration and my gosh what's wrong why can't I get this - so we help our students more because we understand what we went through and we don't want them to have to go through exactly the same maybe craziness and… me, we're both meeting a need and if I can help someone, give them an extra, extra hand to help meet the need, that's I guess why I'm here. That's kind of my job. And then whenever there's humor,…whenever there's another commonality, it's icing on the cake and makes it all the more motivating.

Yeah, I agree. And on that note, Daniel, thank you very much.

Thank you, Abigail, appreciate it.

You can get in touch with Daniel via the Elevate directory of English teachers