Unless I overlooked it, I didn’t see a forum specifically for studying in Taiwan, so I’ll put this question here. I’m considering attending an undergraduate program here in Taiwan, and would like to hear from others who have or are doing this. I saw a disturbing post that talked about how low Taiwan universities are ranked internationally. While I was never expecting super high quality education here, I’m beginning to wonder if it would be better to go back home (even though that would put me many, many thousands of dollars in debt). Ideas?
Depends what you’re studying and where you’re studying.
Engineering or similar sciences I know are actually taught very well at my old school (NCKU). At schools famous for engineering I’d imagine they’d be taught well too. I’ve also never heard any foreign Engineering or Science students (undergrad or postgrad) complaining about their course.
Law, Humanities (Literature, History), Social Sciences (Politics, Psychology), Business are all places I’ve heard LOTS of complaints about. I was doing literature and ended up dropping out because I can’t be bothered to attend classes where the point is that you’re alive at the end of semester and went to all the classes - a good chunk of teachers don’t bother to teach you anything. The standard method of teaching here is to read out of the textbook while the students sleep.
Out of my two years I had some teachers who were absolutely fantastic. And I mean really fantastic. They were challenging and really made you appreciate the content.
I’ve had some who were pretty average, but reasonable. You would learn attending their classes.
And then I’ve had some who were bad. Of my bad teachers, these four strike me the most:
One woman who took us for an elective computer class (Flash). Please note that we did not ONCE use the computers in class during the entire semester. We sat at our workstations, she remotely controlled our screens and read the textbook word-for-wordwhile playing the demo cd that came with the textbook. I wish I was kidding, but I wasn’t. We were all told to buy the textbook, which was bloody expensive, and then all she did was read it for us and expect us to teach ourselves to do our homework (silly me, i didn’t buy the textbook because I was expecting to actually work in class).
One man who is a highly respected professor because he’s lively in his classes, who had us for an 8am class where he spent 90minutes out of 120 (I actually time it once) talking about random crap. His wife, why NCKU was better than NTU, why he lived in Taipei and commuted to Tainan, different names for types of make-up over the centuries, different appreciations of beauty over the centuries… some of it was acutally pretty interesting. Usually teachers like this (and there are quite a few) give you really easy exams to make up for the fact that they’ve taught barely anything during the class. This guy was strict as hell - you need to MEMORISE THE BOOK and if ONE character is wrong he gives you a 0. Every report for his class I received at least an 80 for, and every single report I either copied the textbook word-for-word or copied and pasted essays off the internet. He liked me because I was foreign, I disliked him because I wasn’t there so he could show off his Japanese to the class.
One guy who spent the entire semester bitching about how Taiwanese education was terrible and how his university experience in the US was so much better, and how we all need to learn to express our opinions. The entire semester’s content consisted of students forming groups and making presentations to the class, which were then discussed by the class. No guidance was given on our presentations, we were not graded on the accuracy of the bullshit we were reporting on, the presentations were voluntary (i.e. extra credit), no topic was given for the presentations. I paid to attend a semester of show-and-tell. This class at least is impossible to pass provided you’ve attended a few times. All I really learnt from it is that given the option 90% of students will research a topic merely by googling it and copying the first three results, unless they’re Malaysian in which case they actually present something thoughtful and well-executed.
(Note: I have a friend doing a Ph.D in political science and every single class she’s had this last year and a half have effectively been this. This girl’s a fullbright scholar or something else ridiculously intelligent, has been sent around Africa as an academic consultant as part of some scholar program, and now she’s here on a Taiwan scholarship and just going out and getting drunk every night, because it makes no difference to her grades.)
The fourth one is a fabulous teacher. Incredibly, incredibly smart. He taught us Constitutional Democracy for three weeks and it was fantastic. Then he split us into groups and made us research a law and present about it to the class for the rest of the semester, and discuss problems with the law with the class @.@; To be honest the presentations weren’t that bad. The final exam would be on information from the presentations, unless you did the English exam in which case you had to read a book on Constitutional Democracy (only book I’ve read in a LONG time that made me feel dumb - great read) and answer an essay question, in which case everything from Week 3 to Finals Week was completely moot to you. This teacher actually wasn’t that bad, it was just he’s such a good teacher - kind of pissed that he took the lazy route and we didn’t end up learning a whole lot (it was an elective class, but still).
Other negative things:
Expect all your classes to be in Chinese. If you speak Chinese, great; if you don’t, you better either be really good at being bored or prepared to bring a laptop/homework to class so you have something to do. Your textbooks will likely be in English. It’s unlikely anyone else will have a laptop, but you are allowed one and the teacher probably won’t say anything because you’re a foreigner.
Taiwan likes group assignments. Group assignments are hell wherever you go, but they’re a special type of hell in Taiwan because Taiwanese culture dictates that you meet 12 times in the first three weeks to put out random ideas and agree on nothing for fear of seeming pushy. As the foreigner you’re likely to be ignored and left out till the very end, at which point they’ll start bitching that you didn’t do anything. (This happened to me once. I then had to rewrite the friggin report so we passed after the teacher had returned it to us 12 times already. I did actually go and see the teacher and say ‘Well, I’m not participating because they’re not telling me when we’re having meetings’, and it was the democracy teacher so he was reasonably cool about it (I made sure he knew that the final report was written by me as well). After this experience I started skipping the first two meetings and then turning up at the third and making the decisions so we got started; after this things would go well and we’d all do swimmingly. This won’t work if you can’t speak Chinese (or if your groupmates can’t speak fluent English)).
The international office will keep you informed of activities for the international students, but won’t tell you thinks like, say, orientation for your department or your first-year camp because they’re ‘all in Chinese and foreign students wouldn’t be interested in them’. Note that your classmates are unlikely to tell you about the first-year camp (or anything else similar) because they think you already know and don’t realise that instead of being on the department mailing list you’re on the international office mailing list. This means you’ll miss out on a tonne of opportunities to make friends in your class and this is what school here is all about - making friends. If you come here make friends with a classmate early on and make sure they know that you never get any of the news; eventually your classmates will start to realised and pass it on to you.
Taiwanese students are kind of shy of the foreigner and expect us to all be open and happy and friendly, even though they all met each other online during the summer and we know no-one (because foreigners are friendly, right?). So if you’re shy and quiet until you settle in people might start thinking that you dislike everyone and then it will be very hard to make friends. Your school may assign you a buddy, but this buddy will likely not be in your class and will have nothing to do with your classmates. If you’re lucky you’ll get a senior student mentor like your classmates, but this seems to vary by department (i.e. whether they got the list of foreign students or not when they were matching students up).
Universities seem to get some sort of government kickbacks for having foreign students so they encourage us with free tuition, english textbooks, English classes etc. Local students are kind of a little resentful that we get free tuition by virtue of being foreign (when they have to pay shitloads if they go to our countries), or that we can get by in a lot of classes without having to do the presentations (since the classes are in Chinese and unis don’t seem to have enforced some ‘minimum level of Chinese required’ before you come in), but if you’re friendly they’re generally pretty cool about it.
Some teachers, however, hate it. I never had these problems with my teachers (I was the only foreigner in the department - YEAH) but I’ve heard of students taking classes that are REQUIRED to graduate, and having the teacher announce in the first class ‘If you’re a foreigner you won’t pass this class, so drop it now.’ The departments will back up their teachers no matter what they do, so you’re fucked unless you can take a replacement at another university. There have also been teachers who speak fluent English and refuse to give you an English exam or let you write your report in English - I can understand the former if you’re allowed to use a dictionary and speak passable Chinese,and I understand the latter if you speak passable Chinese, but there are students who speak literally two words of Chinese being told to write the entire exam in Chinese. Of course they don’t get told this until exam time - at the begnning of semester they were allowed to take it in English or write a report to compensate.
In plenty of classes your attendance will count more than your actual grade. There is no official split here for marks - kind of like the US - so if the teacher decides that he’s going to fail you for skipping half his classes despite you getting 90% on all of your exams and reports, you have no recourse. On the flip side, it also means that you can be passed if you attend everything, don’t study, fail everything and email your teacher some sob-story about breaking up with your boyfriend/girlfriend and being distraught this semester. Or, in the case of a friend of mine, fail the same class repeatedly for four years and end up being passed because the teacher’s given up and is sick of seeing you.
On the bright side, I’ve passed these stories onto friends who are professors here in Engineering and Mathmatics and they’ve all been shocked. That, plus the fact that I’ve never met a single Engineering/maths/hard science foreign student here who was dissatisfied with their programme, makes me think that if you want to study hard sciences, this is a good place to do it.
If you don’t want to study hard sciences and want to doss around for four years, here is a good place to do it. By ‘doss around’ I mean: attend every class (never miss a class!), sit somewhere near the front, don’t be late to class or hand in assignments late. If you do this, regardless of whether or not you actually study and pass anything, you will pass every course because you have a ‘good attitude’. So if you just want the bit of paper with minimum fuss, Taiwan’s perfect. If you want to learn something, go elsewhere!
(Note: I’ve actually heard that a lot of Universities in America are really similar nowadays.)
As an aside, Norway has free tuition for international students, and degrees may actually be taught in English.
If you have a full scholarship that covers living expenses and tuition, going to a Taiwanese university might be a good decision; it depends on what you want to do in the future. If you don’t have a scholarship and are planning to work your way through somehow, I wouldn’t do my undergraduate here.
Having a scholarship is a huge plus for obvious reasons, but don’t expect to get much of anything out of your classes/professors. You’ll need to spend a lot of hours teaching yourself. This isn’t a necessarily a bad thing, if you can do it. If you don’t have a scholarship, though, you’ll have a bunch more stress and a lot less time to teach yourself. This is the situation I am in now and it’s not pleasant. But, if your really, really, really want to learn Mandarin well, going to school while working could be worth it. If you are interested in some area of study, like biology, and not Mandarin, I would go back home regardless, because in those areas, the quality of instruction is important.
One other thing, I found out recently that departments are rated. Students that test higher can go to the better departments. This is something to think about; you might be interested in Chinese literature, but the Chinese departments, I’ve recently discovered, are some of the worst in terms of quality, so you’ll be more likely to be disappointed there than in the law department, for example.
Lastly, attending a western university can be a great experience – it’s been the only time in my life when everyone around me was really focused on learning and thinking. But then again, a western college experience can be a big waste of time. It’s all about what choices you make. If you think you’ll be a heavy drinker, then quality doesn’t really matter and I would go to Taiwan, where you’ll most likely drink and spend less.
So absolutely true. :bravo: I missed the orientation completely, for this reason. I did manage to make it to my department’s barbeque activity, which was extremely useful for networking, though even getting to this was a trauma. The kids at the small desk where people were registering their attendance were completely confused by my presence, as I was not on any of their lists (since my official enrollment has not yet been completed), and since they were all terrified to talk to me (there was an immediate frozen silence when I turned up, as they turned to each other with looks of desperation wondering which of them h had sufficient confidence in their English to engage me in conversation), and the response was only marginally better when I started speaking Chinese. They eventually convinced me that I needed to be elsewhere, so I walked off to the international students’ office to see if I could figure out what was going on. The girls there were about to leave, but helped me out by making a couple of phone calls and confirming that the barbeque actually had nothing to do with their department and they had no idea who would know anything about it.
I returned to the barbeque and succeeded in convincing the kids at the desk that I belonged there. At this point I started hovering at the edges of the crowd, which was divided into two basic groups, one of them about a tenth the size of the other. Reluctant to approach either group, I hovered until a young man welcomed me in excellent English, introducing himself as one of the department’s professors. He was very personable, and I felt much more comfortable as a result of my conversation with him. He brought me over to the smaller of the two groups, which turned out to be the international students’ group. This consisted largely of a number of high spirited Indonesian girls (almost all of them Muslim, though their jeans and casual attitudes quickly dismissed any preconceptions their head coverings may have promoted), along with a few Vietnamese girls, a Korean lad and a Japanese lad.
I was still reticent about introducing myself, but after some uncomfortable floating around the edges, I was scruffed by a couple of the Indonesian girls, and shortly afterwards found myself quite taken up in the entire business. I really enjoyed kicking around with the Indonesian chicks. They were good natured, noisy, cheerful, friendly, and were very soon speaking in a very familiar manner with me, as if we had been friends for months. One of them in particular was an extremely bright little spark (standing at about four foot nothing), who was teasing me in no time, and was delighted when I responded with humorous mockery of her country, culture, and language (it was probably one of the best Australian-Indonesian exchanges in about 20 years). One of the Indonesian chicks introduced me to one of the Vietnamese girls, who in turn introduced me to a couple of the other Viet girls. They were quieter and less energetic than the Indonesians, and much more intense but quite fun, and I enjoyed the change of pace. Later I sat with the Indonesian chicks and watched with great amusement as they flirted playfully with the Korean lad and the Japanese lad, who both looked like they had been kicked out of their respective countries for being insufficiently cool, and seemed completely overwhelmed by what was probably more female attention than they’d ever experienced since kindy.
During the course of the evening at least four lads were thrown into the fountain, which pleased me greatly. It’s so good to see the old traditions maintained, and this helped reassure me that I had chosen the right university.
This probably has something to do with department ratings.
[quote=“archylgp”][quote=“tsukinodeynatsu”]
Engineering or similar sciences I know are actually taught very well at my old school (NCKU). At schools famous for engineering I’d imagine they’d be taught well too. I’ve also never heard any foreign Engineering or Science students (undergrad or postgrad) complaining about their course.
Law, Humanities (Literature, History), Social Sciences (Politics, Psychology), Business are all places I’ve heard LOTS of complaints about. I was doing literature and ended up dropping out because I can’t be bothered to attend classes where the point is that you’re alive at the end of semester and went to all the classes - a good chunk of teachers don’t bother to teach you anything. The standard method of teaching here is to read out of the textbook while the students sleep.
[/quote]
This probably has something to do with department ratings.[/quote]
Most likely. My department was rated pretty crap; this meant that some of the teachers were really, really innovative (in Chinese literature!) which got my hopes up in the first year. Then it all went down the ‘traditional’ path in the second. You do CL, you know what I mean 
Taiwanese Literature is actually supposed to be quite good, because there’s absolutely no establishment. It’s all brand new so they’re doing what they like and not bothering too much with face, which apparently leads to really cool classes. I say apparently because I never actually got into any of them!
My SO did CL at NTU, though, and upon attending one of my classes at NCKU (the one with the 8am talkative hypocrite teacher) he said he couldn’t believe how slack our school was, when he did it you spent the entire class taking notes and asking questions or you were screwed. We just slept. Or giggled, if you wanted to get good marks (because the teacher liked it when you laughed at his jokes and would give you better marks for it. No kidding.)
[quote=“tsukinodeynatsu”][quote=“archylgp”][quote=“tsukinodeynatsu”]
Engineering or similar sciences I know are actually taught very well at my old school (NCKU). At schools famous for engineering I’d imagine they’d be taught well too. I’ve also never heard any foreign Engineering or Science students (undergrad or postgrad) complaining about their course.
Law, Humanities (Literature, History), Social Sciences (Politics, Psychology), Business are all places I’ve heard LOTS of complaints about. I was doing literature and ended up dropping out because I can’t be bothered to attend classes where the point is that you’re alive at the end of semester and went to all the classes - a good chunk of teachers don’t bother to teach you anything. The standard method of teaching here is to read out of the textbook while the students sleep.
[/quote]
This probably has something to do with department ratings.[/quote]
Most likely. My department was rated pretty crap; this meant that some of the teachers were really, really innovative (in Chinese literature!) which got my hopes up in the first year. Then it all went down the ‘traditional’ path in the second. You do CL, you know what I mean
Taiwanese Literature is actually supposed to be quite good, because there’s absolutely no establishment. It’s all brand new so they’re doing what they like and not bothering too much with face, which apparently leads to really cool classes. I say apparently because I never actually got into any of them!
My SO did CL at NTU, though, and upon attending one of my classes at NCKU (the one with the 8am talkative hypocrite teacher) he said he couldn’t believe how slack our school was, when he did it you spent the entire class taking notes and asking questions or you were screwed. We just slept. Or giggled, if you wanted to get good marks (because the teacher liked it when you laughed at his jokes and would give you better marks for it. No kidding.)[/quote]
Interesting. I’ve been to the Taiwanese literature department at NTU many times – took a class right next to it. The class, though, was the most pointless academic experience of my life. It has changed my opinion of NTU completely. It wasn’t a Taiwanese Literature class, though, but Chinese dialectology. I guess there is a big difference between departments, even in the social sciences/liberal arts. By the way, I totally agree with your take on the importance of attendance over everything else, including learning, which seems to the least important thing. I’ve thought about dropping out many times, but I don’t know what to do instead. I’m married here, too, which makes leaving a bit more complicated.
[quote=“archylgp”]
Interesting. I’ve been to the Taiwanese literature department at NTU many times – took a class right next to it. The class, though, was the most pointless academic experience of my life. It has changed my opinion of NTU completely. It wasn’t a Taiwanese Literature class, though, but Chinese dialectology. I guess there is a big difference between departments, even in the social sciences/liberal arts. By the way, I totally agree with your take on the importance of attendance over everything else, including learning, which seems to the least important thing. I’ve thought about dropping out many times, but I don’t know what to do instead. I’m married here, too, which makes leaving a bit more complicated.[/quote]
I thought I was going to be expelled for bad marks (stemming from low attendence), so I did some serious along thinking on the ‘OMG WHAT AM I GONNA DOOOOOOOOOO’ line back in the summer. I ended up not getting kicked out and dropping out instead, because I realised I didn’t need the bit of paper for what I want to do in life.
Are you married to a local? Because then you can work in Taiwan without an issue, irregardless of degree. Most schools that want a degree are happy to take a foreigner with experience and a JFRV, if you fancy teaching. Translating’s pretty good because you can do it online, though you’ll need a connection (read: need to be lucky) to get into the field mostly. Better to take overseas cases than Taiwanese or Chinese cases because the pay’s much better.
Otherwise, well, you know - if you can’t find a job, MAKE a job. Paper is important for finding a job, but much less important for making a job.
I was always under the impression that you wanted to be in Academia, however, for which paper is much, much more important.
As for the ‘attendance is more important than anything else’ - 100x this. I actually went into the department office on my last day last term and said ‘Convince me not to drop out, becasue I’m failing to see the point in this whole exercise.’ I ended up have a two hour conversation with the 主教 (I think that’s what he’s called? No idea in English) during which he explained to me that Taiwan’s education is shite because of the parents. Interestingly enough, an American friend was explaining to me that American universities are now getting really shite because of the helicopter parents.
Would dialectology be 聲韻學?
My experience has been: the more famous the professor, the worse the class experience. The higher ranked the professor, the worse the class experience.
In my days at a (graduate, but same idea) program that is rated #1 in its field in Taiwan (or #2, some would dispute the precise order – but note that there are really only 2 programs of this type in Taiwan… :aiyo: ) I had a full professor who forced us to meet on Saturday afternoons in Taipei City for his convenience, at which point he then rattled on for three hours (it was a 3 hour class starting at 2 pm) about what a fantastic translator he was and how many times he had saved the bacon of whatever organization he’d been working for at the time. I suppose this vaguely tied into History of Translation. He then assigned a textbook that was illegally photocopied and only available in Simplified characters. No one read it. Which didn’t matter since the entire grade was based on your final paper – the grade for the whole year, as the first semester grade was just a “wait for the second semester grade”. I was the first to bring a notebook computer to class, but after that they sprang up like mushrooms. I actually made a fair amount of money during those sessions, translating (which at least had something to do with the topic, I suppose…)
I had another “famous” translator teacher who occupied a High Position in the department and whose method of holding the Theory of Translation class was to assign books for groups of 3 to give reports on. She actually fell asleep during many of these presentations – and this was a class of about 20 students in a small room, very difficult to pull that one off. The students dutifully continued to drone on about their Powerpoint presentations (with the obligatory animated GIFs) while she literally snored. She would also assign books in English to students in the Japanese-Chinese cohort and books in Japanese to those in the English-Chinese cohort. I was fortunate to be able to broker my fluent and fast English reading, scanning and skimming skills as my contribution to the group work, so though the other two in my group didn’t speak or read English particularly well, I read and took notes and they turned it into something presentable in Chinese.
On the other hand, the best teachers I had were ostensibly very junior in the Scheme of Things at the University (one had not even been formally hired, but they were desperate). Those teachers gave a lot of thought to what they were teaching and how to teach it. Most of the senior profs were phoning it in.
My experience in the US is that (with the exception of certain programs like the new for-profit “universities” like the University of Phoenix and similar, which are money mills) most academic programs are still trying to hold on to some degree of rigor. They are being forced to adapt to an ever-lower quality of entering student (most cannot write in English with any degree of accuracy, don’t know how to research, don’t know what plagiarism is and isn’t, etc.) but then again – if you see that happening, it’s time to put in more courses to counteract it. I think education is going to go more and more to a for-profit model with the large corporations getting their fingers in there first, and then you can forget about academic freedom and rigor; it will all be memorization and passing everyone.
I would NEVER put myself in significant debt for an undergraduate degree. These days, while you pretty much need one, it’s almost never the terminal degree. Go to an inexpensive but rigorous community college or state university, then think about finding the best possible rated graduate program when you decide what to do. Also, use CLEP (in the US) to get out of as many courses as possible, and take general studies courses at cheaper community colleges.
There is actually a whole online community of people who are doing their entire college degree through credits-by-examination…pretty interesting stuff.
Taiwan would be an interesting experience as an undergrad, provided you don’t kill yourself or someone else in the process. The frustration level caused by what to us is just a basic lack of logic is amazingly high.
Thanks for the long helpful posts here, especially to tsukinodeynatsu. I teach at a university here in Taiwan and your points have given me lots to think about - both along the lines of “Seriously?! No wonder my students are shocked when I give them feedback!”, and “Uh oh… maybe I should rethink that policy of mine.”
Ironlady said:
[quote]My experience has been: the more famous the professor, the worse the class experience. The higher ranked the professor, the worse the class experience.
[/quote]
QFT. In business it is easier to tell: if the man/woman is famous for having a great business and running it well, then it is an exception to this rule. We’ve had several donate their salaries back to the school, they don’t nee dthe money, yet their classes were really enriching.
This speaks to my experiences here. I’m taking a class now with an internationally well known oracle bones scholar (甲骨文) and he spends at least 2/3 of the class bashing China and other scholars. I learned an interesting phrase in his class last week – 富人二代.
Wow, I didn’t expect so many responses! Thanks for all the input everyone!
I speak, read and write Chinese at a decent level, probably good enough to make it through an undergraduate program (with some extra Mandarin study on the side), so language shouldn’t be an issue. I’m not the stereotypical outgoing Westerner, and this has made it pretty much impossible to make a genuine Taiwanese friend. This might be a problem in school, but I’m getting good at faking it… who knows, it might not make a difference since I’ll be significantly older than all my Taiwanese classmates. Anyway, I want to study Computer Science. I’m thinking NTNU’s or maybe Sochow Uni’s program, since I like the courses available (strong programming emphasis). I looked at NCKU, but didn’t like the courses they offered.
I looked at Norway, since someone mentioned that university there is free. That person was correct, it is free, but at the Bachelor’s level there are no programs in English, only a smattering of classes. The all-English programs are all at the Master’s and PhD level. If you want to do an undergraduate program, you have to speak Norwegian. There are Norwegian courses offered at some universities, but you need about $16,000 USD in the bank to cover your living expenses, otherwise they won’t accept you. I’d be willing to go to Norway and learn Norwegian, actually, but I don’t have $16,000 USD in the bank at the moment… there’s always something…
[quote=“superguavaguy”]Wow, I didn’t expect so many responses! Thanks for all the input everyone!
I speak, read and write Chinese at a decent level, probably good enough to make it through an undergraduate program (with some extra Mandarin study on the side), so language shouldn’t be an issue. I’m not the stereotypical outgoing Westerner, and this has made it pretty much impossible to make a genuine Taiwanese friend. This might be a problem in school, but I’m getting good at faking it… who knows, it might not make a difference since I’ll be significantly older than all my Taiwanese classmates. Anyway, I want to study Computer Science. I’m thinking NTNU’s or maybe Sochow Uni’s program, since I like the courses available (strong programming emphasis). I looked at NCKU, but didn’t like the courses they offered.
I looked at Norway, since someone mentioned that university there is free. That person was correct, it is free, but at the Bachelor’s level there are no programs in English, only a smattering of classes. The all-English programs are all at the Master’s and PhD level. If you want to do an undergraduate program, you have to speak Norwegian. There are Norwegian courses offered at some universities, but you need about $16,000 USD in the bank to cover your living expenses, otherwise they won’t accept you. I’d be willing to go to Norway and learn Norwegian, actually, but I don’t have $16,000 USD in the bank at the moment… there’s always something…[/quote]
You can always get out a $16,000 student loan - still cheaper than school in the states!
Computer Science? That shouldn’t be too bad 
I did a class in Computer Science at NCKU, it was pretty damn good actually - really, really challenging. I liked it a lot, and can now do semi-decent java because of it.
Cost of living in Norway is extremely high, so I don’t think you’d save money there. Learning Norwegian wouldn’t be too hard, compared to other languages, but it’s still an effort.
Sweden used to have free tuition for foreigners, but they abandoned that recently - there’s no guarantee Norway won’t take the same path. Probably less likely however, as they’re even filthier rich than the Swedes.
[quote=“tsukinodeynatsu”]
Would dialectology be 聲韻學?[/quote]
Dialectology is fang1yan2xue2 and could be considered a part of sheng1yun4xue2, although the traditional methods are flawed.
I would like to become a professor, but sometimes it’s hard to keep going when the ultimate goal seems so far away.
I regret my decision to do undergrad here fully. The ONLY reason I’m still here is because I literally get paid $25k a month. I started at NCCU (because OMFG it’s so amazing), then transferred to Ming Chuan because at least Ming Chuan has American accreditation and it’s easy, too easy. I’m just suffering until it’s all over. 
NCCU = Let’s lick the professor’s butthole and memorize everything he says, regurgitate it onto the exam, then choose a, b, c, or d. Always choose “all of the above”.
Ming Chuan = Let’s constantly do group presentations and move retardedly slow in class. Glorified community college.
The problem isn’t the “Taiwanese education system”, it’s the Chinese Confucian respect the teacher and memorize everything bullshit. You are worthless as one single person and only useful as part of a mob errghm group.
I agree, this attendance bullshit needs to stop. I’ve also been told it’s by the parents to force their kids to go to class. Perhaps the parents raise their kids better? If you skip class, it’s your personal responsibility to make up/find out what you missed that day. I’m having an issue with attendance right now. Why? Because I have been “skipping” a class that I didn’t even know was on my schedule. 
My advice: Go to NTU or don’t bother coming here for undergrad.
This seems to be the case for undergraduate classes – I’m in the unfortunate situation of having to take one now. Graduate level courses are a bit better – that is, no tests – but professors still don’t want to see much critical thinking in the course papers.
Ok, I’ve read through all of the posts and have given this a bit of thought.
It seems like one needs to understand that there are two BIG differences regarding Taiwanese and Western (I will consider only American because that is all that I personally know) colleges.
Taiwanese colleges give you a shit experience that you are forced to take.
Western colleges can more than likely give you an excellent experience that you must make a concerted decision to make (oftentimes this depends on your major and not necessarily your school).
I JUST graduated this year from my BA. As to my experience in the States (probably the most recent out of everyone on the board):
I went first to community college then to a state school. I had an excellent, incredibly challenging time- even in my community college where I was the research assistant to my Economics department and got to meet seriously awesome people through it.
In my state school I wrote three major theses (two of which were independent studies). One is in the works for publication now. I was the Vice President to my department. I love love love love my professors for both their expertise and commitment to their students. I am in Taiwan now because of them.
From what people have posted, this type of experience in Taiwan is rarer than a proper T-bone steak with mashed potatoes.
As to finances, who cares if Taiwan pays for it? I was a Pell recipient and got a few scholarships (really really small ones) including TAP. I have about $20k in subsidized loans. $20k in subsidized debt? No biggie. I could probably pay that back in 2.5 years at the rate I’m making money in Taiwan now. And apparently one can defer for basically ever if you know how to talk to Sallie Mae.
So yes, while Taiwan comes with a free ride, think about the quality of that ride before making your decision.