I’ll outline my case and see if anyone has suggestions.
I’ve had two years of Chinese in the U.S. and I just arrived in Taipei for a 2-month summer session at NTNU. I got straight A’s back home in Chinese and worked relatively hard, but I guess there’s no secret that that’s not enough. I can write plenty of characters, I’ve got the tones, and I can transcribe/look up stuff by pinyin, but I still can’t communicate. My vocab just sucks royally and I feel like I’ve actually forgotten some patterns!
I know I shouldn’t be expecting much from my third day here, but I was expecting a little better than this. How do I learn language on the street/in everyday life when necessary conversations are so superficial (ordering food doesn’t take more than mumbling the item’s name, and “xie xie”, although I try to mix it up by asking what time they close)? I’m looking for language exchanges and stuff to do but otherwise I’m tempted to stay in my room and study. I feel like I’d be learning more there.
Maybe a better question is this: since no one “catches” a second language (like a disease) just by passively hanging around it and few have the money or time to hire a 24/7 private tutor, what’s the happy medium and how should I get there from my current situation of not knowing anyone?
There are usually some notices looking for language exchange on the NTNU notice board. When I first got there I put up a sign asking for language exchange with Taiwanese vegetarians and got several responses straight away - from people who weren’t vegetarians but wanted to do language exchange anyway.
If you learned straight northern mainland/Beijing style Chinese at home, you will need some time to tune in to the southern/Taiwan accents in this environment.
By the way, when you ask about when a shop closes in Taiwan, say 打烊 da3yang2 or 休息 xiu1xi2 rather than 關門 guan1men2.
[quote=“Juba”]There are usually some notices looking for language exchange on the NTNU notice board. When I first got there I put up a sign asking for language exchange with Taiwanese vegetarians and got several responses straight away - from people who weren’t vegetarians but wanted to do language exchange anyway.
If you learned straight northern mainland/Beijing style Chinese at home, you will need some time to tune in to the southern/Taiwan accents in this environment.
By the way, when you ask about when a shop closes in Taiwan, say 打烊 da3yang2 or 休息 xiu1xi2 rather than 關門 guan1men2.[/quote]
To the OP: I was in almost exactly the same situation when I arrived in Taiwan oh so many years ago.
Do NOT stay in your room in study. Get out and start doing things. Getting a non-English teaching job really helps since you will have coworkers who do not speak in English.
Find a bar or cafe in your neighborhood to hang out in.
The bored staff will be happy to speak Mandarin with you–although I think you should avoid being a language nazi and insisting on always speaking Mandarin. The point is to make some friends and hang out with them. Find a bar or cafe near your house and hang out there in the evenings. Norwegian Wood in Gongguan or Cozy behind Shida would be good cafe choices. Bobwundaye in Liuzhangli and Mei’s on Yongkang St. are good bars (Well, Mei’s is not exactly a bar) that are used to foreigners speaking Mandarin.
Join a hiking club, take a yoga class, do stuff you enjoy–again, you’ll meet people and end up speaking Mandarin all the time.
Get a TV and watch it. Find some goofy soap opera and repeat the things you hear people saying. This will help you get your head around how people actually talk rather than what is taught in textbooks. Mandarin is a living language, and especially in Taiwan there are big gaps between what is taught and what people actually say.
Don’t waste your time studying characters until you break through on the spoken language. I personally think language exchanges are boring and a waste of time.
You need to create situations where you are able to try and have a conversation that goes beyond ordering food, finding the bathroom, etc.
My fourth month in Taiwan, I moved to Taidong on the east coast. Most afternoons, I’d head out to the beach, pocket-sized vocabulary notebook in hand, and find people to talk to. I’d play xiangqi with the old mainlanders, walk up to a group of people my age and say, in Mandarin, “Excuse me, I’ve got a few questions about Mandarin, can you help me out for a minute?” It was the truth, as I always had a few things I wanted to ask about, and it always resulted in a five to twenty minute conversation. I even made a few friends, which resulted in more opportunities to practice.
Find a few social situations that fit your personality, and get out of the house and be social. Take your notebook with you–use pinyin and bopomofo to write down the words you pick up (you can get as many as five or ten new words in one conversation), then look them up in your dictionary when you’ve got a few minutes to verify the meaning of the words. You’ll be learning vocab. in context, which is the best way to get a bead on what a word means. Keep the notebook with you at all times–during downtime, flip through the pages, remembering the situations in which you learned the words.
I lived in Taidong for three months. When I left, I had two notebooks filled with vocabulary, and I had progressed from very basic spoken Mandarin to being able to hold my own in a long conversation. My college roomate spent a summer in Taoyuan teaching English in 1990. He was such a gregarious fellow that he ended up being able to speak pretty decent Mandarin in only three short months.
I would also add that I think you are probably well prepared to learn a lot. Most of the foreigners I know that have more or less mastered Mandarin, studied at home before coming to Taiwan. There are few exceptions, but most people who started studying in Taiwan tend to pick up bad habits like not knowing ALL of the tones and seem to have more syntax problems. I took a very rigorous Chinese course for two years in the States before coming to Taiwan and although I did very poorly in the class, I really did have a solid foundation in the basics when I got here that later paid off.
For some reason, it took me three or four months here before Mandarin started to click. I remember really floundering at first and feeling stressed about the fact that I had put so much time and effort into studying Chinese but couldn’t say the simplest things. I suspect I was a much more serious case than you are.
I think my initial problem was that I just couldn’t understand anything people said. I remember being confused (and too embarrassed to ask) for months about why clerks in the stores said good morning (actually huan1ying2 guang1lin2) every time I walked into a store. Anyway, after I began to understand more I found that I could hold longer and more sophisticated conversations. The next problem was an inadequate vocabulary and a tendency to try to say things that you can say in English but you can’t say in Mandarin. I think it’s important to listen carefully and take note of what people actually say rather than ‘forcing’ Mandarin by speaking a lot.
The accents floored me when I first arrived, and mine floored them. Having studied “standard” putonghua, everything prior to Taiwan was in a Beijing accent.
Yeah I’m always told that I think too much… I think that’s half my problem and I just can’t stop it.
Anyway, thanks for the great comments. It’s amazing how much changed in one day; since my original post I’ve been approached three times by random people, one of whom practically forced me into a seminar at NTNU on simplified/traditional characters. Feiren I appreciate the “language nazi” warning too, my advisor told me to lie about my ethnicity and never speak English but I think that’s pretty extreme. Even so, I’ll keep it as my wildcard for desperate times.
As far as the TV thing goes, I’m in a hostel with very limited access to a shared TV, and I’m thinking about blowing my money on one of those portable DVD players w/screens, then finding any local stuff with subtitles. Should have bought that laptop before leaving the states…
BTW ‘You think too much’ ni xiang tai duole actually means ‘You worry too much’ and is intended as ‘Don’t worry too much.’ It does not mean that you should give up rational thinking.
‘Xiang3’ is really tricky. For example, if a girl tells you (in English) she has been thinking about you, she is translating directly (and incorrectly) from the Mandarin (Wo hen xiang ni). She means she has been missing you in a romantic sense.
Also it’s funny that someone mentioned “guan1men2” for “close”, cause that’s exactly what I was saying. Now I understand the confused look on that poor cashier’s face.
