In this episode of Walking With Pete I chat to you guys about the Bilingual Talks podcast, career choices, me teaching English, and more.

Walking With Pete – Bilingual Talks, Career Choices, Me Teaching English & More

Hey guys! Welcome to this episode of Walking With Pete.

It’s probably about 8 O’clock I think tonight on a Sunday night. I’ve just been spending the entire day at home. [I] put a few episodes up on the podcast and hung out with a few of my housemates, watched some TV shows. I’ve been watching a TV show called Penny Dreadful, which just wrapped up. Um… [It’s] a little big disappointing how it ended. It seemed to have been a little bit rushed. I think they ran out of funding and um… didn’t get very good ratings on the TV show. So, they had to wrap it up, as we say, to wrap it up, meaning to um… to finish or to complete, to end. And, yeah… So, [I] finished watching that just now and thought I would go for a walk in the park and make another episode of Walking With Pete.

So, what do I want to talk about today? I had something on my mind. Something on my mind. Um… Yeah… So, I was… I’ve been listening to this… this podcast called Bilingual Talks, and it’s a podcast by a guy in the US called Victor, and he speaks natively both English and Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, and I absolutely love it. So, I shared it today on the Facebook page and I just wanted to give a shout-out to Victor and say thanks for what you’re doing and if anyone on the page is either Brazilian or speaks Portuguese and is learning English, or speaks English whether it’s their native language or a language that they have learnt and they want to learn Brazilian Portuguese then I definitely recommend listening to his um… his podcast, Bilingual Talks. So, I’ll be sure to share a link below for this episode of Walking With Pete so you guys can find that if any of you are interested. ‘Cause it’s definitely one of those things that I think… it’s really useful if you… I like learning Brazilian Portuguese in French as well as English because it means that I get to use my French while I’m learning um… Brazilian Portuguese. And so, I really like resources like this where it’s bilingual. You can… you have all of it in Brazilian Portuguese as well as all of it in English. And so, anyone who speaks either of those two languages and is learning the other language can use this resource and make the most of it. So, [I] absolutely love it. [I] just wanted to let you guys know. Check it out if you want to.

And, I was also talking to him today and he was telling me that he teaches English [and Portuguese] and this is something that I’ve been debating doing for a long time just because of my… my fascination and interest in learning foreign languages, and it seems that teaching English is probably one of the best jobs that I can get if I want to be able to travel abroad, travel overseas, I lot more readily, a lot more easily, and have a job wherever I go, no matter where I go. So, for me, it’s difficult, like, I’m doing my PhD and I’ve done that for years. I’ve done a Masters degree before that in evolutionary biology. Before that I did um… an undergraduate degree which was 3 or 4 years long as well, and so, I’ve done all this study at university only to kind of finish my PhD hopefully by the end of this year and then completely change what I’ll be doing for a career, I guess. And, my train of thought keeps kind of changing. There’s so many things I kind of want to talk about, but I think initially I was really really afraid of staying… staying on path and doing the PhD or PhD related sort of area when I get a job. So, doing science or continuing in academia, continuing doing science in whatever area or field it was, when my heart doesn’t feel like it’s 100% in it at the moment. And I don’t know if or when that will ever change, you know? I could potentially never that passionate or interested in… in science as I used to be ever again. And so, I’ve… I’ve sort of been in two minds because you do all this study, you do all this work, and it leads you down this path and you don’t… you sort of don’t want to jump off this path because of the amount of effort that you have had to put in in order to get where you are, but by the same token I don’t want to stay on this path if my heart is elsewhere, you know? I don’t want to miss out on potentially having other experiences and ending up in a happier career because I was too afraid to take a risk and try something new and put what I had done in the past, albeit for a very long time, on the back burner, you know? And focus on other things for a little while. So, that’s why it’s sort of been difficult. I’ve wanted and I’ve debated a lot recently about doing English teaching, and you know, even if it’s just informal lessons here in Melbourne or on Skype through websites like Verbling or iTalki um… but we’ll see. I’ve been debating that. So, I’m going to look into it I think a little more at the moment, in the next, you know, few weeks, and see if I can start giving a few of these lessons, you know, whether it’s… whether it’s just a few to see how I go, to see if like it, to see if I can do it, to see if I’m good at it, you know, doing a podcast is one thing where I talk to myself, effectively, compared to teaching other people. So, who knows how it’ll go, but I would definitely love to hear what you guys think. Do you think it’s a bad idea? You know, quitting the PhD… or not quitting the PhD but changing my career direction. So, I would love to hear what you guys think, you know. Is it a bad idea changing your career sort of choices after such a long time having studied it? Do you think it’s a waste, or do you think it’s a good idea? You know, is it a good idea that you find something else a little more fascinating. You feel like it could be a really really big passion that you could fall in love with. So, is it worth risking it? What do you guys think? Would you do it? Would you give it a try? Or would you stick with what you know and keep doing what you’ve always done and play it safe? Or would you take the risk just in case what you try ends up being something that you absolutely adore, absolutely fall in love with and could pay off a lot more in the long run, you know, for the rest of your life if it turns out to be successful.

And, I guess also I wanted to see if any of you were interested in these kinds of lessons. Do you get these lessons like private English lessons from people, whether you live in Melbourne or whether you live overseas? Do you get them in person? Do you get them with people face-to-face? Or do you get them online via iTalki, via Verbling? Or… yeah, do you even have just other friends who are learning languages that you… that you learn with. ‘Cause I’m just really genuinely curious about how you guys are learning other languages as well as your Australia English or English English or American English, whatever it is that you’re learning at the moment. So, feel free to jump on the Facebook page and let me know, or send me a message. I’m just absolutely curious about how you guys are learning and what you… what you like doing in order to learn when it comes to getting ah… lessons, I guess. And, I guess also if you would be interested in getting lessons from me at all? I’m… I’m sort of interested in knowing how much interest there is in that. If I was to suddenly offer my services here in Melbourne or via Skype would any of you actually be interested in that? Or should I just stick to what I’m doing with the podcast and let you guys stick to what you’re doing? But, yeah… So, I thought I would just put that out there and let you get back to me if you can. Give me some feedback. And who knows, maybe in a year from now I’ll be, you know, living overseas teaching English full-time and continuing to learn languages, which is ideally what I would like to be doing at least at the moment. If you ask me where I would like to be in a year I think it would be overseas in somewhere say like Iceland, Brazil, France, while being able to teach English whether online or whether in person, and while being able to learn a lot of other foreign languages as well, because I kind of… after learning French last year, at least you know, I’m still in the process of learning French, but after reigniting my passion for French and getting to basic fluency last year… ambulance in the background. After doing that I got really passionate about learning languages again and… and started Brazilian this year, Brazilian Portuguese, and I thought I might try and challenge myself and… and learn, you know, maybe 5 languages in 5 years. Can I do that? You know, even if it’s just to basic fluency. You spend one year on a language at a time, but I’m getting to the point now where I’m seeing that I would be able to get so much better so much quicker if I was actually to go overseas obviously.

So, that’s why I’m sort of playing with these ideas and trying to work out what exactly I can do to facilitate that in the future. I definitely want to keep learning languages, and I definitely want to be able to travel, and it seems like teaching English would be the easiest option with regards to a career for allowing me to move around relatively often and freely, compared to if I was trying to find a job using my PhD in science. Um… and any time you would sign up for a job I’m sure it would be for a year or more wherever you go, and there’d be a lot of bureaucracy and paper work. So, that’s why I’m kind of afraid to do that. I don’t want to be too tied down.

Anyway, this episode’s probably getting a bit long so I might leave it at that guys. Let me know what you think and just in general let me know what you think of the podcast. I hope you’re enjoying it. I’ve changed that format up. So, I’m trying to do a weekly set of episodes where I do one pronunciation episode, a Walking With Pete episode, an expressions episode, and I might try and throw in a few odd bits and pieces here and there like the Embarrassing ah… English Errors episodes. I hope you’re liking those, but yeah, just in general give me some feedback. I haven’t really heard from many of you, so, I can definitely see that there’s quite a few people listening, but I haven’t really heard back from… from many people at all. But those I have have loved it. I would just love to chat to more of you though. I’m definitely keen to meet a lot more of you guys who are listening and… and um… not necessarily as active on the Facebook page. Anyway, all the best guys, and I’ll chat to you soon.