Loneliness and Conversational Language Learning

Hello and welcome to Leninus and you, a podcast on the research and experience of Leninus. I'm your host, Axel Seaman. My guest today is Katrina Manov. Katrina Manov is the founder and CEO of Engine, a global nonprofit that has paired over 50,000 English learners and volunteers for online conversation practice and cultural exchange. Prior to starting Engine in 2020, Katrina spent a decade working in the education space, where she helped launch multiple nonprofit and for-profit initiatives. Katrina, welcome. I'm so pleased to have you. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. As always, we invite our guests to start by sharing something that represents their own experiences of Leninus. So, Katrina, what have you brought to share with us today? So, I have a necklace from my native country, Ukraine, and it's called again done, and I'm going to try to hold it up and show you here you see it's quite long. It's a beaded necklace, multi-colored, and it was a gift that I received from Ukraine a couple of years ago from someone who quite met actually through my program that I ran there who became a friend and, again, brought me this very special gift. Wonderful. It looks beautiful. So, describe it to us a little bit. So, this is beads, and it looks quite long, like, is it more like a scarf or, yeah. You know, yeah, it's a very unique sort of Ukrainian style. I haven't really seen it in other cultures, but it is like a necklace that you can put on, and it actually goes all the way like when I put it on, it goes all the way down to my belly button almost. So, yes, it is quite long. You can see there, and it is traditionally there a hand beaded with very intricate patterns. So, you know, this one's got orange and yellow and red and green, white and black, so all kinds of colors. And, yeah, very fancy pattern. I've never been able to make something like this. My self-love, something I really treasure and love to wear. Yeah, beautiful. I couldn't, you know, begin to make anything like this either. So, you met the person who gave this necklace to you via your organization. Tell us a little bit more about, and, you know, sort of also, like, I think we haven't said yet, you know, your country, that's the Ukraine. So, tell us a little bit more about, you know, what you're doing there, how that connects you to the Ukraine. You know, tell us a little bit. So, I started engine about five years ago. Actually, we just celebrated our fifth anniversary. We're reminiscing about our journey, but it started as a small project to connect a few dozen high schoolers over there to a few dozen high schoolers here to practice English. And then it kind of exploded into what is now a global movement, you know, over 50,000 people. And now we have people of all ages in Ukraine. We have volunteers from over 140 countries, and they meet every week and talk for an hour. And that's sort of been the core of it from the beginning. And it's really grown far beyond English practice, which was sort of the idea. I started with to connect people and build real relationships between them. And in some cases, people even traveling across the ocean, spending their own money just to meet the conversation partner that we match them with. So, it's definitely grown into a network, a web of these international connections. And you know, when I was thinking about what to bring, I picked this necklace that you're done. A, because, you know, it's a symbol of the sort of intercultural exchange that happens without discovering and discovering cultures and also because all of these many beads and the necklace reminded me of all the individuals in the web that we will. I'm through engine. And, you know, like I said, it's very colorful, very, very representative of how diverse our community has become. And I thought it was a really nice physical symbol of what we've been weaving over the last five years. Yeah. Before, so, thank you. Before we get a little bit more into, you know, what the weaving produces, this beautiful net and, you know, how that's important for social connection. Let's stick a little bit to just how this works. So, you tell me that people meet once a week and they talk to each other. Tell us more. And, you know, how it's all voluntary. So, you've got, you know, Ukrainian speakers who want to learn English and then you want, you have English speakers who volunteer their time to talk to Ukrainian speakers. Tell us a little bit more how all of this works. Yeah. So, it's, it's really sort of reconceptualizing what, you know, how a non-profit can work and what a non-profit program would look like, right? So, usually think about educational programs or mentorship programs, how it works is maybe you have an application process with a deadline and then you pick, I don't know, 100 people who are the best or maybe the most motivated or have the highest need, right? And then you accept them and you find, you know, whatever resources in the port for them and then you start and then you finish and so on. Really want to build something more more authentic and more inclusive. And, and so our, our program is just a way for anyone at any time to plug in and either improve their English or if they're on the, say, learner side or share their skill, all right? English fluency is something that those of us who speak English as a native language, you know, don't, don't realize what a gift it is, right? For me, I learned it when I came to the US. So, it's something I have always seen as a big gift. But people might say, well, I have no skills on, and, and actually you have, you have a huge skill, you have something that's very valued. So, anyone who speaks English can share that skill and anyone who wants to improve their English can improve it. And both sides can participate in a very authentic cultural exchange, can form an authentic connection with someone across the world that they wouldn't have met otherwise. And there are no deadlines, there are no limits. So, we just accept applications sort of nonstop. It just keeps growing. And, and that's, that's really part of the design because I think so often people want to be part of something, right? They want to learn, they want to grow, they want to connect. And then there's all these barriers and, you know, every little barrier, you're actually going to lose a lot of people. So, so it's just a, yeah, something that sounds very simple, right? You talk, you talk to someone for a week online, but it's actually pretty revolutionary in that it's open to anyone at any time. And it's so simple to get started. And it brings together people that would not have connected otherwise. Yeah, you said in an interview that you gave that I read online that what's different about what you're doing here is that usually, you know, when you have a project like that, either you sort of hone down, you know, so you turn, you select a particular group of people and exclude many others. Therefore, all conversely, you know, it is for everybody, but then it's sort of computerized or mechanized. And it doesn't really, you know, have the human touch. And what you're doing here does both things. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, you said it perfectly. You know, I come from the world of ed tech. I spent a few years working for ed tech startups. I studied it during my master's and I was so excited about how technology could help us reach people who need support, whether it's kids or adults and, you know, education learning. There's so many challenges to solve in that broad area. And I came in very gong how about it. And then I realized that what, you know, what met in practice was replacing human connection with technology. And to me, that human element, it's such a key part of learning, right? I think if you think about your own educational experience as whether a student or teacher, and those are only for me, from the very beginning, you know, I still can think of specific teachers formal and informal who help me grow and become who I am. And, you know, and it was just very sad for me that, you know, automatically said, how are we going to make language learning accessible? We're going to do a link. I mean, it's it's great, but it's not a replacement for having humans to speak with, right? Or, you know, if someone's struggling in math, what are we going to do? Okay, we're going to do a con Academy again, free open to everyone. It's great, but it shouldn't replace the teacher. And so, or tutor, right? Or maybe it's peer learning. There's different ways to do it. But I really wanted to to try to do both, you know, and sort of challenge this, this trade off between being able to have that one attention, you know, and I said, let's not just have a human element, let's have it really as personalized as you can. So everyone gets to have their dedicated volunteer. So they they're journey through engine is going to look completely different, very individualized based on where they are, what their goals are, and we're not going to have any cutoffs, right? Because, you know, within some number of weeks, we will get your your your dedicated volunteer. What do you the volunteers have to bring to the table? So it seems that, you know, if the the the the person who comes and wants to speak English and they're already fairly good at it, then great, because, you know, then you can just have a conversation. But if they're below this level, you have to actually teach them the language. And that doesn't that require, you know, kind of a background that not everybody who's competent in the language is going to have. How do you solve that problem? It's a great question. Probably, you know, one of my biggest messaging challenges is people hear this and they say, Oh, it's teaching English. I'm not a teacher. I can't teach English. And and it's really not that. So you'd be surprised, you know, how much just regular conversation can be helpful for even even beginners, right? So if someone has never studied English, you know, they probably wouldn't be a good fit for for this program. If they can't even say, you know, my name is Katarina, I'm 37 years old, what not. And I would just bring them for that. But anyone that's above that, which is actually the vast majority of Ukrainians, because the thing in Ukraine, and I think it's not the only country like this, like almost everyone studying it right now. And, you know, in school, like, you know, it's good for you. It's, it's including the curriculum. But very, very, very few learn to actually speak. I think I saw a statistic that only 1% of Ukrainians considered themselves fluent in spoken English, whereas 90 plus percent study it. So there's a huge gap. So actually, there's not really a need for grammar vocabulary, you know, structured teaching as much. It's happening. That opportunity is there. If you don't have it in school or university, that's actually where, you know, technology without the human connection can come in. You do your dualingo. You're, you're looking at free videos on YouTube. So all of that is really accessible. There's, you know, a number of schools where you can, you can sign up for lessons, if you're not, if you're an adult, if you're not currently in formal learning. But what's really missing is the opportunity to use what you're learning and talk to real humans. And so that's what we're adding. It's very much a supplemental tool for conversation practice. And most of the people in our program, like most Ukrainians, have studied or are studying formally. So we're sort of filling that gap and actually using the skills. Yeah. I mean, as anyone, you know, who's learned the foreign language, I sort of, I try to learn Russian, which is not the same, but, you know, quite closely related to Ukrainian. I try to learn Russian when I was at university. And it did not go terribly well. And then I spent a summer actually in Ukraine. I mean, this is, you know, a long time ago before the war. Yes, yes, yes. I was on the Crimea actually. And, yeah, yeah. And it, you know, then it all sort of came together, the stuff that I kind of knew and couldn't really put into practice. So, you know, I think any language learner will confirm that you need to actually talk to someone and then your brain somehow does it. Yeah. Yeah. I think anyone who studied a foreign language, any foreign language, you don't get that concept very quickly. All right. When we talk about the speaking, because your experience is so common for me, it was with Spanish. Most recently, when, you know, I guess at first it was English when I came to the United States from Ukraine. And I had a person, a mentor who just met at the free library lessons that they did for immigrants. And she, she took me as a little girl into movies and out to a cafe and just talked to me and really gave me that safe space to speak. And then the second time was with Spanish when I went to study abroad, Madrid after having studied it for years and within, you know, weeks, it was all coming together. And I can communicate. So, when I was coming up with the idea of engine, I was thinking, well, how do you bottle that experience in a way that's going to be very accessible, right? Because not everyone is going to meet someone in real life who's willing to work with them for, for free, and really provide that regular thoughtful practice is going to go deeper than just sort of small talk, you know, with the cashier at the Barrel Series, or you can really speak and more extended way and get comfortable. You know, very few people can actually study abroad and travel to the country where the language is spoken. So, how do you take the essence of that and sort of bottle it up in a way that's really, really easy to give to everyone? So it's, yeah, it's directly inspired by that same kind of experience. Can you speculate a little bit about why the human element matters so much in language learning, but in learning generally? I mean, you know, I'm an academic, so I'm, you know, a teacher as well. And obviously, you know, this is my experience too, that in order to really, you know, get my students to understand and grow, we need the interaction. And for me to grow, you know, it's, it's, it's mutual. We need the interaction with each other, like just homework is not going to do it. And I sometimes think so. I teach philosophy and, you know, philosophy is really something that happens in thinking stuff through together, but I think it's generally true. And I always want to know, like, why do other people matter so much in that process? Do you have any views on that? Yeah, I do. And you're obviously the, the direct reason for something like speaking English is, well, you have to do the thing, right? In order to get good at the thing. And, and, and it's very hard to sort of speak to yourself. Now, you might say, well, now they're coming out with AIs that you can speak to. And, and this is brand new. So it's very interesting, where it'll go. They obviously, you can already crack this with AI writing to it and it writes back. And they're coming out with tools where you can talk to it and it talks back. So, so why do you still in humans? I think it's all about the motivation, actually, something like learning a language. I often use the metaphors like going to the gym. You know, it's good for you, right? You know, you need to do it. It's not complicated. You understand like how to get yourself to the gym and what to do once there. Usually the problem is not being motivated to do it. So if you get a personal trainer, or you get an accountability body, or you're just saying, okay, I'll meet my friend at the gym, right? Or you join in groups. That provides the motivation. And for us, that that's what we see as a big part of why it's so valuable to have that person. Even though that person, usually that volunteer is not an English language teacher. It's a very small minority of our volunteers who have professional background, but it's just so extremely valuable because especially with the one-on-one format, right? If I don't show up, then my volunteer is going to sit there and be sad. If I show up and I didn't read the article that we agreed that we'd talk about, it's going to be an awkward conversation, right? But again, they will feel sad. I think in a bigger group, this is, it's still true. It can be harder. You know, again, our example of a speaking practice, it's very easy to hide if you're shy. And even there's you know, five people, so it's a relatively small group and you're just going to be quiet. And there's me the one guy who just loves to talk and kind of cover those pauses for you. So I think that's a big part of why we do one-on-one and we've been doing some two-on-one, which still works. They're really well. It's just really the motivation because I think that's such a big challenge, right? To showing up and doing the work regularly to develop any skill, which a lot of learning is just practice and effort and putting the work in. I think probably as technology gets more sophisticated, there's a lot of individualizing customised support that it can offer, which before you have to rely on humans for. But I don't know if it can be as motivating as like the real human connection. Yeah, because you know that, you know, even if the bot says, "I really disappointed you didn't read this article." You still know it's just the machine. It's just saying that it's not really feeling anything, right? I think, yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Does it ever happen that the language instruction or the practice then goes the other way too? If I were to do this as somebody who can provide knowledge of English or English conversation, I do want to learn about the other side. I do want to learn. I'd get better at my Russian/Ukrainian too. Does that ever happen? That it goes both ways. Yes, it does. I think that's something that certainly is not required, because we don't want people to feel like, well, they need to learn Ukrainian or they need to be interested in language learning themselves to volunteer. But a number of them are, and it is really a fun and I think motivating also for the students, because as you're an English learner, you're speaking in English and confidence is such a big part of it, because you're going to say the wrong thing, you're going to pause. But then if you have your volunteer saying something in Ukraine and stumbling over it, then it kind of equalizes the playing field a little bit and makes you more comfortable with your mistakes. So when it happens, we think it's a really positive aspect. When it doesn't happen even, we do have the cultural parts. Even if they're not learning Ukrainian, they are absolutely sharing holidays, family stories. Here's even something like, I think we have heard from a volunteer, the students took them on FaceTime just around town to run errands. You got a present for his kid went to the post office. Here's how the post office looks thinking of Ukraine. Here's how it's different from the US. So there's definitely this back and forth, which I think keeps people motivated. I would say a number of Ukrainians would not be comfortable speaking Russian right now. That's my one caveat, but everyone's happy to share Ukrainian with volunteers. That brings me to the next question I wanted to ask you about. So you started in five years ago, and so you fully fell into a political situation. The war, how did that affect your organization? What happened to you and the people you work with when the war broke out wasn't posed on you? When Russian made in Ukraine in February 2022, obviously was a super, super difficult moment for us. Most of the team is, you know, Ukraine and Ukraine. Some of them are now refugees, but at the time almost everyone was physically in Ukraine. We plot operations for a month, and the big question for me at first was, you know, is this really still needed, right? People are dying. There's huge humanitarian needs. It's important to just have conversations, and the overwhelming response actually from both our team members in Ukraine and our students was yes, because this is a way that we resist voting. This is a way that we connect to the world and tell our stories, which unfortunately are often drowned out by the very powerful Russian propaganda machine. You know, it's a little terrifying. I just saw a survey that last week that they spoke with Americans of all political backgrounds and asked them 10 things that are clearly disproven, clear Russian propaganda. And I can go over half of them believed at least one of them was true right? So obviously we can't, you know, we don't have the same resources, but fighting it even in a very grassroots way, giving Ukrainians the voice to share their stories, to share the truth, is a way of at least fighting back against it, you know, and doing what we can. I think also, just the emotional support that students got from having someone who was not in the war zone, they could just kind of vent and unload to and having that person be a safe space for them, that's something that, you know, before the full scale invasion was not a part of the program, but certainly has become a major part of the program. So yeah, so the clear message was this needs to keep happening actually demand increased in Ukraine. And our little silver lining, you know, of Russia's invasion was that for the first time, you know, people knew and cared about Ukraine and the way that really they didn't during the first couple of years. So actually during the first couple of years, it was all high school and college students working with high school and college students and the volunteers and main motivation was volunteer hours for their resumes. Some of them had to get them to graduate, others, it was heavily encouraged and they were plenty of medical school and they wanted, you know, they need a certain number of community service hours, but with the with the pulse gun invasion, we got a huge influx of volunteers of all ages who wanted to help and usually you read about something terrible on the news and you can't do anything right wherever it happens. This is this is something that that's always I think been the case and we're we provided a very easy, very direct way to channel that frustration and pain and fear into action and and make something positive out of it. So that was the, I would say that the biggest change is that we really opened up the program to all ages and began growing a lot faster and really that's what engine became when it is today, which is not just a peer-to-peer program for youth, but a program to connect anyone. Yeah, right. It seems to have become, you know, a social project in, you know, across boundaries, across borders, to some extent, also a political project. I mean, I think that language is always a political project, you know, and conversation is something because it provides some sort of basic, you know, human connection that has a huge, not just because it's about something, but, you know, the very fact of having conversations in itself is a massive social connector, isn't it? And a force with a good, would you, would you agree with that? Yes, well, you know, it's interesting, but the part about being political, I guess, then this is this is philosophical, like what is politics, right? I mean, I never thought of our work as political because we don't, we don't go and hold rallies for one political candidate or another. I thought of it as more universal, but I suppose if you mean fighting for freedom and, you know, democracy's right to exist without being invaded and destroyed, I mean, if that's political, I guess, I think that, you know, human connection is what we have left, you know, when we have nothing else. I think that is sort of the meaning of life, and I do think when you have huge social problems, when you have economic or challenges, if you have war, right? I mean, when you strip it all away, it's really our humanity and finding our common humanity that can make things better. So, so I guess that's how I think about our work in that bigger context. Yeah, I can see that, like, you know, human connection remains on the other, but the other flip side or the other aspect rather than the flip side of this is what also, you know, sort of has to remain in order to have any kind of, you know, fruitful conversation is at least the attempt to abide by what's true, right? That's, you know, and I think that, you know, you mentioned that already in what you said earlier, right? That, you know, sort of in having these conversations and in just, you know, recounting what's the case, right? He is what happens, obviously, like, he is what's going on here. You are, you know, so you are, you are contributing to just just telling what's the case, telling the trees, and that's part of it too. Yeah, I think, I think exactly, you know, personal stories and personal experiences, at least for us, is really the focus of the conversation. And I think that it provides insights into life and, you know, in different countries, right? The life in Ukraine for volunteers, but then life and in all the countries where our volunteers are from, where they are Ukrainians. And yeah, this is, you know, this is what we see a lot. And I have heard from volunteers that it's so interesting and it's so different from what you see on the news because it's sort of zoomed in in the very human perspective. And you don't, yeah, you just, yeah, you don't have any other way of experiencing that sort of travel, right? I think when people travel, you hear a lot of the same kind of feedback like, wow, I really saw how life is there. And again, I mean, not always, right? You can travel and stay very separated from the real life in a different country. But I think a trend and travel over the past, I don't know, five, 10 years has been a sort of authentic immersion. And this is, I guess, a way for everyone who can't go and do that to have that experience. Yes, it's very much about the personal stories and the personal life experiences of the participants. Yeah. In the few minutes that we've left, where do you want this to go? I mean, do you want to eventually, do you want the project to grow beyond an exchange of Ukrainian speakers and English speakers to include other languages, or is that not in the cards? Like, you know, what, what, where, where do you want to go with what you're doing? I think the big idea is to really get to a critical mass of Ukrainians. So have an impact on the entire country. All right. I really want to get to a million Ukrainian participants to catalyze social economic development in Ukraine. And you really can't do that if you're too small or even, you know, let's say if I had that same million participants spread out all over the world, sure, you would see the personal benefits to each person. But you wouldn't have any sort of concentrated macroeconomic benefits. And to me, that's another part of what's really revolutionary about this, you know, working in a very personal way as personal as you can get one-on-one, right? And sort of rolling that up through a million incremental improvements in people's lives to transform a whole country. I really want to create like a template that other nations can use and say, well, you know, we want to invest in our human capital too. We're seeing, you know, all these benefits and, you know, some of them are more quantitative and some of them are more qualitative, right? We have been talked a ton about loneliness and engine wasn't meant to solve loneliness at the beginning. But it does really bring connection to people's lives and that does make them ultimately healthy and more productive citizens, right? So this is very much investing in human capital is something I'm thinking of at a, you know, countrywide level. And that's why I think it's really important for me to really make it work in Ukraine to be sort of like a shining beacon of what other countries can do through English or, you know, or whatever makes sense in their context. But I do think it's a very replicable model once we get to that point where we're having, we're having nationwide impact. I think then other nations will definitely be interested in bringing something like this to their people. And so that's my my ideal, you know, however close we get to it, I think we're already having a lot of impact on that personal level and it does, it does really help both sides. So that's one thing that also, you know, regardless of how far we scale, I hope to really promote and encourage this idea of building mutually beneficial and equitable relationships and moving away from the victim savior dynamic that's common in nonprofits. I think it's something that we've already done very well. We have a lot of volunteers who say I'm benefiting as much or more than my student, they almost feel guilty about it, but that's sort of the design, you know, so maybe spreading that gospel to other organizations and really inspiring a new way of thinking about connecting people that is more, more from the same level, more, more respectful rather than one sort of saving the other and putting one above the other. But yeah, you know, if honestly the last five years have been such a whirlwind and I know for sure I can't predict what's going to happen next, so I'm just kind of along for the ride. Wonderful. I think that's a great moment to end our times up unfortunately, but I wish you all the best for this wonderful project. I hope it it thrives and it flourishes and it gets more people to connect to each other. Yeah, and it contributes to social change in a meaningful way. Thank you for all the work that you do and thanks for the time that you've spent with us today. Thank you, Axel. Thank you for listening. To loneliness and you, a podcast on the research and experience of loneliness. My guess today was Katrina Manov. As always, you can join the conversation by emailing us at [email protected] or following us on Instagram and TikTok @loneliness.pod. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review and subscribe to Loneliness and you wherever you get your podcasts. Loneliness and you is produced by Stason Goldman and myself Axel Seaman. This episode was engineered and edited by Steve Salina. Our introductory sound was designed by Dave Meckin and our logo art is by Paul Fischer Davies. The podcast is financially supported by Bettany University. Thanks for listening and talk to you. [MUSIC]