All this language course talk reminds me of a roommate I had many, many years ago. He was going to some program associated with Yale University…which I think was at National Taiwan University. Anyway, he was taking 6 hours of class per day…2 hours in 6 person class…2 hours in 2 person class…and 2 hours one-on-one. I used to see him reading every night before going to bed. I finally asked him what he was reading. Chinese dictionary. That was a serious student.
3 Likes
I had a good experience at Shida, I learned a lot and my Chinese is very good now. You can read a bit more about my opinions in the thread folks are linking above as well. Your own background, time available to dedicate to study, and willingness to study will have a big effect on the outcome. Things changed a lot with the release of the newest edition of Shida’s book in 2015.
I won’t argue that the experiences of some of the Shida detractors are invalid, I’ll just contribute that the time I spent there was very worth it for me.
As a datapoint: I got a job requiring me to speak in Chinese after a year of full-time “intensive” Chinese study at Shida. After that, my Chinese continued to improve of course (or so I hope!)
5 Likes
Sorry, but how can you claim “not much has changed” if you don’t know…? Shida released a new book series in 2015. If you had a bad experience, that’s fine. But I think it’s disingenuous to say they’re using a 30 year old book and repeating it back to you.
Any updates on ntu’s two programs? Might be getting a good scholarship to study Mandarin at NTU (or can choose another university program in Taipei). Still waiting to here back if I got it or not but just curious about the experience with the intensive Mandarin Program at NTU if money was no issue.
1 Like
Then perhaps they shouldn’t fill up my study time with useless garbage like music and acting classes as well as Beginner Taigi that repeats over and over. We’re adults, we have lives and full time jobs so we don’t starve to death. Absolutely no respect for the lives and time of students.
Maybe a focused curriculum that helps people get to a point of sustainability instead of useless topics like ancient family values and the olympics would help too.
And when taking feedback, they need to drop the attitude. We’re customers. And I will rail against them until I drop dead. If I can prevent money from going to their dirty pockets, I know my job is done.
I was even harrassed by another student, and they tried to move me out of my class despite having a conflict with my job time instead of removing the other student cause she’s autistic. I’m autistic! What about me! She can use the card but I can’t?
Absolute bullshit.
But when I came down with severe gastroenteritis and was shitting yellow every 20 minutes, they chose to accommodate other students’ complaints because I wasn’t allowed to rest at home. Attendance, sickness or health, is mandatory.
I will rail against them until I am six feet under. I should’ve went to the media back then but I was new to the country and didn’t know what I know now.
2 Likes
Did they also change over all the teachers in 2015? This a frequent topic on the forum and the experiences shared are pretty par for the course.
I didn’t have a bad experience per se. I still learned Chinese, but Chinese Culture University was far better.
2 Likes
I assume you mean ICLP? I did a program like that in China (quite a few ppl I know from that program also did ICLP, it seems like they’re all about the same in craziness). Basically, the learning is on you, just turn the self-study workload up to a thousand compared to the other programs. 50-200 new vocabulary words need to be learned (writing, correct tones, correct spelling) for the quiz the next day (at least in the program I did). No looking at your notes, checking your phone, etc. during class because somehow it’s “student centered learning” to have the student learn everything before they come to class. All that does is it makes you really good at describing things instead of just using the correct word and it means the teacher’s only job is to reprimand you for being a human being with a normal brain that literally can’t learn that much stuff at once.
People have described it as drinking from a firehouse. Yes.
I have thought about going to ICLP to kick me into high gear over the years, but I know what kind of burnout is inevitable after only a few days of that kind of workload. I can’t imagine trying to spend another semester suffering through that.
Not to mention, if I’m going to self-study (cuz that literally is what ICLP is, you learn everything outside of class and then “use it in class”), I have methods that work for me that no Chinese teacher I have met agrees with. Yet when I actually use those methods (shadowing, reading texts where I understand most of the content and also tapping the words I don’t know and immediately learning the English definition), my Chinese improves enough that Taiwanese friends notice and point it out. The problem always comes with motivation. If you’re paying USD6,000/semester, you don’t want to waste that money. If you’re on scholarship, you probably need to take the TOCFL at the end and show you’ve made improvements.
The TLDR is that you’re only going to be successful with the right study strategies, regardless of where you go. If your teachers are telling to you to memorize these grammar patterns and vocab words tonight and all you do is throw the words into your flashcard app of choice because you only really need to know the vocab words, you’ll pass the quizzes and make limited progress on your usable Chinese. If you actually interact with the language and hear it and read it in different ways, you’ll make enormous progress. No Chinese teacher in Taiwan teaches that way, so you’ll be fighting the people who claim to know everything and need to impart knowledge (that’s not helpful/literally why most people fail to learn Chinese) on you every step of the way.
If your Chinese isn’t already really good, by which I mean, you can pick up an elementary school student novel and read and understand it completely, without looking up anything but obscure place names, language intensives are just going to build your complex sentence building and obscure vocabulary. They do nothing to help you with foundational/useful language like “is this fruit ripe?” Or “what kind of coffee do they sell?”
2 Likes
Studied at ShiDa a long time ago. In short: Was good, but wouldn’t go there again.
Long answer and my personal experience and opinion only:
- Classes had 5-10 people. Nice, friendly people from all over the world, but mostly Japan, Korea and overseas Chinese (Malaysia, Thailand, but also USA).
- Teachers: mix of old and young. Mostly female but also mixed. Mostly I liked the teachers.
- Study material: That was way back, so was books.
- I went from A1/A2 to maybe B1. After 3-4 months, we spoke Mandarin in our free time among ourselves while having lunch.
Ok, that all sounds good. Here is why I wouldn’t go again:
- 80% of your effort will be spend memorising how to handwrite traditional Chinese characters. For me that is a complete waste of time! I am never handwriting Chinese characters.
- A lot is focussed on exams but that is often quite different to real language ability.
- You constantly hear bad accents from your Japanese, French… fellow students and they hear your bad accent. That contributes to the typical foreigner accent.
- To add: You constantly hear wrong tones and it is just impossible to correct everything always.
So, here is what I would do: Define your goals first (some people in this thread just wanted to learn a little bit of Mandarin.
If your goal is to really learn Chinese: Check out Misha’s interview with Will. These two have mastered Chinese and I like their approach. https://www.peakmandarin.com
In short, this is what I would do:
- Get a tutor for 1 hour 1 on 1 every day.
- Get language exchange partners
- Travel to some place where most people speak Chinese (not Taipei - there are too many English speakers).
- Get started with sentence mining and Anki!
- Watch 2-3 hours of Youtube in Chinese every day!
2 Likes
Phonics practise is non existent.
1 Like
It depends, Are you looking to go to the Mandarin Training Centre or into the department of Chinese? A big difference in the quality of teaching at each one, the latter being better.
That doesn’t sound very useful. It’s why I didn’t like my last class. It went at a lightening pace and the teacher thought I was stupid if I couldn’t remember vocab in a single day which was frustrating. There was just a non stop stream of vocabulary and I just couldn’t keep up with remembering all of it so fast. Especially since they also want you to know how to write it all. I think it’s just too much all at once. Doesn’t help the material was quite boring as well.
But anyway I have to pick some university. It sounds to me like they will all be roughly the same though from what you have said here. A little frustrating but I sympathize with the teachers. Teaching adults with such low ability is difficult
1 Like
Avoid the biggest schools, shida and ntu. They are the most expensive and most old fashioned.
Go to CCU or TKU. I went to CCU the classes were laid back, we were mostly free to speak if we wanted to. The worst part is you need to pass tests to progress. Which is fine until the tests start getting hard. You will be made to repeat a semester if you fail a test, even though you want to pay them money to learn more Chinese… they won’t let you. I’m assuming all Chinese schools are like this though. Obviously it depends on you. But there’s nothing more pointless to me than tests so this was my biggest gripe.
Personally i would say the classes have a good and bad side. They give you a good foundation but they do not really teach you how to speak Chinese outside of the classroom environment. So at the end of the day if you want to actually be interacting with Taiwanese people and living your life here then you are just wasting time staying long term at these schools. Go for a year or so, get your basics up and then duck out and transfer your learning to real life Taiwanese people. Then you will start learning actual Chinese (and some Taiwanese, that nobody is gonna teach you in class) that people use.
And another point is to don’t get put off by other students being able to learn Chinese faster. They won’t tell you this in class but most students are Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese. All of these languages have some relation to Chinese so students from these country’s usually learn faster. I’ve had Thai and Indonesian students too and they were slower in comparison.
3 Likes
I see that ICLP now has the option to switch to fewer classes but have them be 1:1 to “meet the needs of students”. If that’s the case, you could probably tell your teacher to shove it if they tell you to “just remember that word” and try to cover your notes or tell you to put them away. Maybe. Idk. I really miss the camaraderie of Chinese class, but teachers here really are incapable of meeting student needs.
5 Likes
You can thank some of your predecessors in Taiwan who used studying at Mandarin Training Centers as a visa mill to reside in Taiwan and work through the 1990s. It might have lasted for a few more years had not a foreign teacher at the school where one of the ‘students’ taught unwisely ‘dated’ three of his adult students. At the same time.
Once they found out, they joined together and complained to the city government labor bureau which investigated all of the teachers at the school leading to the discovery of the language class scam. Some of the teachers had been taking, failing, and repeating the first two levels of Mandarin for a decade!
Testing, stricter attendance rules, and a maximum period of study were imposed as a result.
1 Like
There’s a maximum period of study? Or a maximum amount of time you can be on a student visa to study?
Maximum period for purposes of visa/residence. Sorry.
I think it’s two years.
1 Like
Yeah nah maybe. The real visa mill schools were located near to the police station that handled visa extensions on Zhonghua Rd. Perfect and Flag mainly. MTC you still had to attend classes no? Perfect and Flag you paid NTD3000 a month and signed a months attendance sheet in one go then popped next door for a rubber stamp extension. Eventually there was a crackdown and you had to be enrolled at a university which is when many universities opened downtown classes.
2 Likes
As I dimly recall the teachers who had been doing the MTC classes were former customers of Perfect and Flag before those stopped working. One or both of them were closed at one point around 1992(?) but came back online for a few years after that.
At least one of the teachers I knew who went to the MTCs really did go to class and actually learned to speak very good Mandarin there. All you need to know is really in those first two books if you have no interest in learning the written language, which he did not. By the end, he could recite those books from memory…
1 Like
I had one Vietnamese classmate who barely ever showed up and when she did she was usually sleeping. She was working 10 hours a day, even had her own cleaning ayi. She got kicked off. Also saw a bunch of hooker looking thai girls at the uni. No doubt they are using the visa to stay and get some solid work done on the side.
But seriously, attendance requirements are enough. You already need to put in 15 hours a week plus home work every day its a slog already, the tests really made it a slightly miserable experience for me at the end.
1 Like
Yeah I was using Perfect as late as 2003 I think. And then the visa runs themselves became non viable. because of the landing visa the trade offices weren’t issuing visas.