Can the average Taiwanese person speak English?

I think the name of the site should be changed from Taiwannews.com to PimpingOutOurFriendsYouTubeChannels.com.

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Interesting share OP, what’s your take on this?

You think the Youtuber’s experiment is valid?

Can the average Taiwan News journalist write non-vomit-inducing copy?

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In a word : NO
In two words : NO
IN three words: NO

you get the picture

Not really, but what do people expect?

Taiwan news sux

Dumb. Limited experiment. I’m out every day and most people cannot speak English.

FAKE NEWS by Taiwan News.

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she has another video in hong kong testing if mandarin speakers (aimed at chinese) will be treated rude. because hong kongers can’t tell the difference of a taiwan and mainland accent…

i would say a more interesting and useful video would be to ask why taiwanese speak English to foreigners already speaking to them in chinese. not hating, just think that would be a much more interesting video than this.

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Aren’t you guys a bit too harsh on the OP? It’s not like other news media outlets don’t have stuff like this, and I’m not just talking about Taiwanese ones. I can’t count how many times I see bullshit like STOP EATING AVOCADO RIGHT NOW from like BBC or BREAKING AND THEN NOTHING from CNN on my Facebook feeds, with some occasional typos.

Because they want to ease communication, I guess. Or maybe they just want to talk english because they spent years learning it.

It doesn’t happen that often IME.

Taipei’s service industry has improved in leaps-and-bounds when it comes to their communication in English. We shouldn’t be too surprised about this since a large percentage of elementary school kids have had some form of extra English learning since the early 2000s. Taipei is starting to compare well with South Korea, as a whole. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for other cities.

That news is about as real as being in Taipei for a couple sunny days and then reporting that it doesn’t rain in Taipei.

it would be interesting to see why they do it, as sometimes it doesn’t make any sense. and it would be helpful for new foreigners to know why. when i first came here i found it really annoying as i wanted to practice ordering in chinese. the current video doesn’t really offer much. you could watch any number of tourist videos and see people using english. i think she just wanted to pretend she was a foreigner.

My mandarin is ‘tourist phrasebook’ level and I find only about 1/10 people will respond in English - and that’s in Taipei City. The rest seem very content to let me struggle and embarrass myself in mando.

Where are you going that has so many English speakers?

Interesting for whom?
You could always use the Search function and read the hundreds of threads on here in which this subject has been discussed into oblivion.

I thought the video was fine, although it should probably be re-titled for Taipei rather than all of Taiwan.
Also maybe some kind of warning regarding the young lady’s nearly insufferable accent.

My thought exactly.

Well that’s the game of just about every ABC, TBA, CBC, TBC etc. in Taipei. Of which there are currently 653,417. But to be fair her English is good. I clicked on the link expecting the usual mess of Chinglish but, yeah, she’s good, if annoying.

useful for new foreigners…as i said in my comment.

don’t pretend 95% of new foreigners here don’t get pee’d off by this. a video showing the local perspective could help give some understanding.