They don’t have good customer service.
Older teachers and administrative staff don’t handle complaints well and will attempt to kick you out for even thinking of questioning their omnipotent wisdom.
Chinese often taught is the Beijing variety cause some students want to learn Chinese here to ‘do business’ in China. Political leanings are very blue holding onto the outdated notion and education that the ROC is the one true china while completely ignoring the Taiwanese variety of Mandarin spoken by the people here.
You will be forced learn utterly useless niche traditional cultural concepts and other cultural things like the Olympics(that one stood out to me) before you are even remotely sustainable, competent and independent in the language. Basic things are not taught. You will know at most a few colours and almost no shapes and when confronted, they suggested I learn basic concepts on the street while they teach me niche cultural concepts.
Exams are one hour and barely cover the work. If you happen to not know those exact characters or concepts or grammar pieces on the exam, you will fail. The learning methods are to be able to regurgitate everything 100% and the system does not account for slower learners or 70% learners. Your test of grammar concepts will be limited to a single sentence, which means that if you so happen to forget any of the characters on that sentence, despite able to demonstrate use of the grammar concepts, you will fail.
Shihda has a problem with its students. Teachers expect you to give them 100% of your time and treat learning like a full time job. I downgraded to regular classes from intensive when I took a job because you know I need to EAT and LIVE. Often, extremely enthusiastic students with money will push teachers in regular classes to go faster or teach at intensive levels without regard for people like me that can’t go faster and need a slower pace. This was also during a particularly bad case of gastroenteritis that lasted about four weeks so… yeah. One of my teachers indulged them and made tonnes of extra reading materials that weren’t part of the curriculum but were tested anyways, increasing the work, school and commuting burdens on top of my, at-the-time health burdens. Complaints fell on deaf ears and students complained I was holding them back, despite them being in the regular classes. Administration attempted to move me out of the class instead of putting the students who want faster learning into intensive.
Harassment claims I made about another student who, in another class constantly berated me publicly for failing to understand a concept fell on deaf ears. Their solution was to move me every time something happened, but I had a job too… If a student complained about me? They tried to move me. If i complained about another student, they STILL tried to move me. When writing reviews about teachers I didn’t like at the end of the semester, I was pulled over and given talkings to.
My last teacher always liked to use literal triangles in learning for words he already repeated. It was awful.
Regular classes force you to spend 1/3 of your time learning useless side things like music or art. One is a Taiwanese class but
A) They’re repeated the SAME WAY every semester and start at 0.
B) The only useful thing, the Taiwanese class, is taught the wrong way using the wrong characters and barely go into detail. @Greves would lose his mind.
You are not gonna like Shihda. They’re only happy if they’re taking your money.