I work Mon-Fri, 9 to 6, and want to learn Mandarin intensively to be fluent. I’m at an intermediate level now; daily communication is pretty solid; writing and reading are also okay (except for very technical/field-specific terms).
I have three options:
Hire a private tutor, for 2 hours every day. Since I live in a tiny room, I have to consider going to a cafe + paying for drinks for both of us.
Enroll in a Chinese language center; night class.
Enroll in a Chinese language center; weekend class.
With a private tutor, you can get a personalized schedule and material. If I enroll in a language center, I will have the opportunity to practice my speaking skills with fellow students (and make new friends!).
Do you guys have any recommendations for private tutors/CLCs (Taipei)?
Street Chinese: Ditch the classroom setting, hire an articulate college student for 400NT per hour and go out and about on the streets of Taipei talking in real time about everything and anything you encounter. Focus on real life interactions. Go to the bank. Go to a restaurant, mall, government office and let your language guide walk you thru what you have to say to negotiate the situation.
Artificial situations in a classroom setting are no match for the rich variety of everyday life when it comes to learning a language quickly.
The college student is a good idea. Or you could just get a girlfriend who speaks zero English. Then you’d be forced to communicate. Unless you two only meet up for quick sex.
On second thought, a college student at 400 NT per hour would be cheaper than a Taiwanese girlfriend.
Depends on time commitment but there are some intensive night classes that last a few months and I read good reviews for them. I think for native level writing you may need to find professional class or tutoring.
I like classes because the social aspect and questions will be asked that one might not think of by themselves. Like this forum vs a private line conversation. More ground gets covered.
Socially, in person group classes are great. You can also notice differences between your pronunciation/sentence structures, etc. and that of your classmates, giving you a clearer idea of what’s “right”. From an actually learning Chinese standpoint, however, the majority of Chinese teachers just ramble on about details about individual characters that you can easily learn about in ten seconds with a quick glance at Pleco. They also go into stupidity detailed looks at grammar. I’ve had three different teachers call on a random person to read a never before seen text (characters only) aloud as a key part of the lesson. No shit the students in your class don’t know half the characters — you the teacher choose a supplementary text where we didn’t know how half the characters! That’s called not knowing what you’re doing. After that, I forfeited the social aspect of Chinese class and found other methods to learn on my own (without a teacher.)
If you’re beyond a basic conversational level, the above means you really waste your time basically paying NT600/class listening to someone ramble on in Chinese while the “real” learning must be done on your own (memorizing vocabulary words, how to write the characters, etc.). To me, what brought my Chinese from intermediate plateau (though technically “advanced”) for years to really very good was listening to really easy content (HSK 1 and 2) and a method called “chorusing”, which is basically where you talk over the recording you’re listening to. I find it far more efficient than trying to convince teachers that what they’re doing is wasting everyone’s time (they really don’t like the question “how does this help me be better at using Chinese to communicate?” 99.9% of teachers use methods that do little to help you reach that goal). Still, if you really want to improve, you can focus on what you want to focus on with a tutor much more easily than if you’re in a group class.
Nah, I much much prefer a skinny guy with a big heart than a gym bro with a big chest lol.
Anyway, I decided to go with iTalki and took trial classes with Taiwanese teachers. I decided on a teacher who used to work as an engineer in the same field as my current job.
