Entrevista com Tim Barrett (Tim and Tammy Teach), 1 de 3

Hello! Voltamos com a série de entrevistas em inglês, desta vez com uma figura conhecida e querida por vários leitores do Inglês Online: Tim Barrett, que dá dicas de phrasal verbs aqui no site e mantém o Tim and Tammy Teach – se você ainda não conhece, passe por lá e dê uma olhada no que eles oferecem.

Na entrevista mais longa que já fiz, Tim fala nesta primeira parte sobre sua família de professores de inglês, como é “pertencer” a dois países e explica o que é uma third culture kid.

A transcrição da entrevista vem logo abaixo, e você pode também baixar os arquivos MP3 (clique com o botão direito do mouse para salvar) e PDF, que contém a transcrição do áudio.

Ouça a primeira parte da entrevista aqui mesmo:

Transcrição da entrevista

Hello, and what’s the weather like…?
(Ana) Hi everybody, this is Ana Luiza of Inglês Online. Ahm, I’m here talking to Tim Barrett of Tim and Tammy Teach. To access their website, go to http://www.timandtammy.com. Hello Tim!
(Tim) Hi Ana! Hi, members of Inglês Online. Thank you for having me.
(Ana) Thank you for giving us the interview. So, tell me, what’s the weather like right now in Jundiaí?
(Tim) Hot. But I’m sitting here in my air-conditioned room, so I… I shouldn’t be doing this, I have this cold, as you can hear. but it’s hot outside. Not too different from São Paulo, probably, right now.
(Ana) Yeah, it’s ok but I’ve always heard that Jundiaí is usually warmer than São Paulo, is it true?
(Tim) Well, I’ve always heard the opposite but I guess… Guess it’s always warmer at the other side of the fence, huh?

Tim talks about himself and his family
(Ana) Let’s start with our first question. The first thing I always ask is, tell us a little bit about yourself, uh, how did you and your family end up living in Brazil? Because your parents are American, right?
(Tim) I am too, actually.
(Ana) You were born, you and your siblings were all born in the United States.
(Tim) Well, not really. My older sister and I were born in the States and then I have two other sisters, and a brother, who were born here in Brazil. But they have, they have dual citizenship too. I have a “visto permanente”…
(Ana) Right.
(Tim) … to Brazil, so…
(Ana) Oh, so you’re actually not a dual citizen.
(Tim) No. Unlike my brother and my, my two sisters. ‘Cause they were born here. We were, I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, then my sister was born in, ah, Williamsburg, Pennsylvania. Of course my parents are from New Jersey. I was the only one born in the South.
(Ana) I’m not sure I can recognize a Southern accent here… Do you still speak…?
(Tim) No, I don’t, I don’t have a southern accent. I have an accent more from Pennsylvania, or else I’d be taking like this – Hey, my name is Tim! – that’s how they speak in Tennessee.
(Ana) Ok…
(Tim) Hi Tim! I’m not so good at imitating accents, but… That’s, it would be, Hi, my name’s Tim! If I were from, but I was born in Knoxville, TN. My parents were working there at the time, so. Leia mais

How they ended up in Brazil e o que são third culture kids
(Ana)  So how did you guys end up coming to Brazil?
(Tim) Well, we have a very atypical life, so… Very unconventional. What
I am, I’m, I’m considered an MK, a missionary kid. My parents were, are
Baptist missionaries here in Brazil. So, we initially came with them.
They came to Brazil in 1976, so I was about three years old at the
time. And, so we, we’d live like, four years here, then we’d go back to
the States and live a year, a year and a half there, come back here…
So, we… we’d come back and forth all the time.
(Ana) So always changing schools, making new friends…
(Tim) Yeah, all the time. That’s a typical… What we’re considered, I’d
be considered a… it’s called a TCK, we’re known as TCKs – third culture
kids.
(Ana) Third cultural kids…
(Tim) Third culture – culture, that’s a hard word – kids. Meaning, um…
like, military kids are called military brats, MBs… MK is missionary
kids. We have a, a culture of our own, we’re very unique in that sense
because, um, you know, we… It’s not like an immigrant that goes to live
permanently…
(Ana) Yeah, and never leaves the country.
(Tim) Yeah. But we are… we do move to another country, we stay there
for a long time, and a lot of times we make it our home, like I have
with Brazil. Basically, I’m married to a Brazilian now, and… I’ve made
Brazil my home, to a certain extent. So… but you’re not an immigrant
because you didn’t come to live permanently, forever. I could go back
to the States and often do, so…
You have this… ah, you know this, you know, you know these cultures
very well, you know, two different cultures, and you… But basically,
third culture kids have a culture of their own actually.
(Ana) Ok. I think I get what you’re saying. Because you never really… I
mean, you still have very strong bonds with, with the US right? You
must have lots of relatives, and you visit so frequently.
(Tim) Yeah, we… Ah, they say that you know you’re an MK when you can’t answer the question ‘Where’s home?’
(Ana) Yeah… Well, yes, ok, so I’m not gonna ask you that question, ok?
(Tim) We’re basically citizens of the world. But we feel a very strong
bond to our… It depends, there are all kinds of third culture kids, but
you feel a very strong bond to your home country, which would be the
States. Because you basically don’t really have very deep roots
anywhere, to tell the truth.
But you feel a very strong connection to your own country, because you
know, it’s… You have to say, I’m from the States and, of course, we
love the States, and my parents passed that on to us and we always go
back and all our relatives live there… Aunts, uncles, of course my
grandparents passed away but… It’s just my immediate family here in
Brazil. So we feel very strong, very American and feel very patriotic
towards the States, but…
Then of course I love Brazil too. That’s a funny thing. So I get
touched when I see the Brazilian flag, I get touched when I see the
American flag, the Brazil, when I hear the Brazilian national anthem,
the American… I feel like I, I have both cultures actually.

Teaching English is a family affair
(Ana) Yep, ok. So tell me, how did you end up teaching English to
Brazilians? Because I understand that that’s what you and… at least a
few of your siblings do, right?
(Tim) Yeah, actually all of them. Three sisters and a brother and my niece now. So it’s a family affair.
(Ana) Wow… Did your parents do that, when they first arrived…?
(Tim) No. My dad says he wouldn’t know how to teach English.
(Ana) He wouldn’t know?
(Tim) He… I know we’re gonna talk about phrasal verbs pretty soon, but he said, What are phrasal verbs?
(Ana) I know…
(Tim) Because, you know… we just use them, we don’t teach them like that.
(Ana) Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, it’s the same in Portuguese, I
mean, if I were to teach a Brazilian about, you know, all the grammar
rules, oh my God… yeah.
(Tim) But what happened, ah… like I said, I basically made Brazil my
home, and… so I started in 1992, teaching English. I started in an
English school here in Jundiaí and then I went off on my own. So I’ve
been teaching… let’s calculate now, seven, sixteen years now. And then,
that’s how I… Of course I’m involved with the ministry too, I help my
parents. I work with my dad also. It’s missionary work but also… I, you
know, I support myself, I make a living by teaching English in Jundiaí.
(Ana) Wow, so now… what does it look like? Do you guys have your own school, or is it just, you know, private teaching…
(Tim) Well, it’s private teaching, but we have a house next door here,
where we all teach. All my sisters, my brother… My brother started
studying Letras here in Brazil.
(Ana) Letras?
(Tim) Uh-huh. I graduated from something totally different… theology.
But my brother is studying Letras, my two sisters, my two younger
sisters are also, I think, gonna start this year studying Letras.

Portuguese vs. English
(Ana) So, yeah, something that you mentioned before, you know, you were
talking about ‘third culture kid’, ah and that’s one of the things that
I wanted to ask you because, you’re basically, I mean, you’re basically
an American Brazilian or a Brazilian American… I don’t know what you
prefer.
(Tim) Yeah, something like that. I speak ‘Portenglish’ or…
(Ana) Yeah… do you sometimes catch yourself like, mixing the languages?
(Tim) Yes!
(Ana) And you don’t remember a word in one of the languages and then you use, you know, the word in the other language?
(Tim) Yes, not so much even that I won’t… we don’t remember a word…
Sometimes that happens, you don’t remember one language or the other,
but actually what happens to us… Because we grew up speaking both
languages, so… And of course my parents, when we came to Brazil they
had to learn Portuguese… Ah, the first time we were here, we were here
for about four years and of course at home we always spoke English.
So, and we were very young so I didn’t really learn Portuguese that
well. And we went back to the States and we were there for a year and a
half and I totally forgot my Portuguese. And then when we came back the
second time I was eight years old. So they put, they put me and my
sister, at the time, in a Brazilian school.
And, so that’s when I really picked up Portuguese, and it just… naturally.
(Ana) But didn’t you think, like, the second time, that it just came back kind of easily?
(Tim) Well, for my sister it did, she was a little older than I was,
but I totally forgot, you know, I guess I didn’t have a lot of
Portuguese… but I remember in the beginning, I didn’t understand… I can
remember that very well. ‘Cause specially when you move from one
country to another like that all the time, we’d be in one place and
you’d be uprooted, and go to another place to stay for a long time…
I can remember the first time I came to Brazil when I was about three,
because it’s a very… ah, traumatizing, I guess, experience, or not
traumatizing…
(Ana) Yeah, it’s a very remarkable experience, right, for a child…

Fiquem ligados – a entrevista continua!