How’s NTU’s CLD? Any feedback?
Me? I stopped learning Chinese when Shihda decided that they would rather kick me out instead of improving their service.
They just care about getting sponges as students. It’s easy and means they do little work.
One day I will start learning again. I’m fairly competent on my own volition and know the characters I need for daily life, but… I don’t care to learn about the olympics, a once-in-four-year event.
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That’s some heavy shit.
Thanks, I think you’ve managed to convince me in skipping NTNU.
I’ll start by self studying first.
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The only reason why the locals say NTNU is because a lot of the foreigners go there cause it’s cheap and the area is full of foreigners. Locals have no clue the experience as an adult and can’t relate. The learning style is very asian so the Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese will enjoy the rigourous rote memorisation without being able to practise with their classmates in upper levels.
Western foreigners often drop off by the fourth book when their visa and money run out. In upper levels, you’re often the only westerner in a class with people who have some native intuition in Asian culture and learning styles. You probably won’t be practising with the shy Japanese guy beside you and any attempt to try to understand this particular feature of a language is like pulling teeth. They are not set up for western learners.
A western teacher could teach you Chinese better cause then they can explain why you put this particle here etc…
Right here. Same thing. They actively try TEACHING US this accent at the school. Good thing I paid attention to my friends to pick up a Taiwanese accent.
Now every clerk asks me why I sound like I am from Taiwan when I go to China.
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I’ll give NTNU a bit of credit for not teaching things the exact way they’re said in Taiwan. For example, it’s important for a variety of reasons to know (on a basic level) that 是 is technically ㄕˋ(shì) not ㄙˋ(sì) although it is almost always pronounced the latter way in Taiwan in informal situations. Taiwanese students also learn the “proper” pronunciation of things when they’re in school. They also do tend to teach the Taiwanese versions of words (腳踏車 rather than 自行車) for the most part. There are a few exceptions, like teaching students to say 很有意思 which is not common in Taiwan.
What I won’t excuse is teaching things like 下載 as ㄒㄧㄚˋㄗㄞˋ(xiàzài) rather than ㄒㄧㄚˋㄗㄞˇ(xiàzâi), when it is always said the latter way in Taiwan and not saying it this way could lead to confusion. Better teachers will be careful to let you know this when learning, but not every one will.
I think any formal language program mostly works this way, you have to balance what is technically “correct” and what is actually heard day-to-day. This gap can be closed by a lot of speaking and listening practice in addition to class, imo.
I’ve never heard of a US school teaching a UK accent because ‘that’s where the language originates from’
Meanwhile, foreigners go out to the road and are like
Cesuo zai nar? and then locals sayin, uhh we don’t say it that way here.
I came to Taiwan. I want to speak the local lingo.
If you want Beijing, Zher Shr diannao sharng Diar. Go to Beijing.
What is technically correct? We have US English. Canadian English. UK English. Australian English.
Why can’t Taiwanese Mandarin be correct as well and its own standard?
Indispensible resource for those looking to reduce their accent 
That’s what they do at NTNU for EVERYTHING. Follow an obsolete version of Blue China’s Beijing Dialect.
Sī án, hìⁿ?
At least one local lingo.
I didn’t say it’s because that’s where the language originates from or anything. NTNU also doesn’t teach erhua, I don’t know if they ever did in the past but I have never learned “zai nar” or whatever.
I mean, how do Taiwanese newscasters speak? No erhua, but they do pronounce their zh ch sh accurately. I’d say the Chinese that NTNU teaches is more like a newscaster than a typical Chinese person, but it can vary from teacher to teacher since it’s such a big school.
I’ve also read through that article before, and I’d say for the most point it’s pretty in line with what is taught at NTNU, at least for the parts that are “official”. We didn’t ever learn lājī, it was always lèsè, learning various particles at the end of sentences, even Taiwanese loan words. I heard they change the books every 5 years or so, could they have changed it based on feedback since you were there?
My older teachers did. My books did.
Australian broadcasters don’t pronounce their news like Americans or brits. Why should our news be bluewashed?
Maybe. But they werent so happy to take feedback from students in my experience.
Oh my god, is this NTNU material? Yeah, it’s definitely changed. I can’t speak to your specific experiences with the staff, but it’s definitely much more Taiwanese-ified(?) now.
And on the news thing, idk man. I don’t know why they do it that way, but currently the MOE doesn’t officially recognize the “everyday” pronunciations of things ㄕ/ㄙ(sh/s) as “proper” mandarin, so it probably comes from that.
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Mandarin is not exactly a local lingo… seems like most of the points in this thread make that clear actually haha.
I started learning Chinese from scratch (for free) on Coursera. The course was put together by NTU. The material is up to date and nothing like the ancient video above. Here’s the link: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learn-chinese-mandarin/home/welcome
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fluentu teachers mandarin chinese tprs style
By that logic, neither is English or Spanish in most countries. I’m just talking about today.
Not really the same. Mandarin is new, brought by a foreign government and forced on the existing population at great expense (e.g., blood in the streets). There are still older people alive today who remember the time when Mandarin was unheard in Taiwan.
Most of those places that speak English or Spanish today have already done so for hundreds of years, during which the languages were gradually adopted.
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Ok, but at this point, Mandarin is fully entrenched, Taiwanese is starting to thrive again. The population are largely bilingual and Trilingual with Englis. This is good, keeps the mind fresh for longer.
Agree with @Marco. Years back I dropped from an Advanced Mandarin class that I took to improve my formal writing when I realised that… well… I was not learning how to write but only memorising sentence after sentence. The teachers were not correcting my mistakes, but simply drawing a red line and writing something that had nothing to do with what I was trying to say, but “fitted” one of the many template sentences in the book. When I argued that this method was not helping, the standard reply was that I “don’t understand Mandarin logic (邏輯)”, which is different from that of us waiguoren. Maybe true, but saying A instead of B has little to do with logic. Not meaning to be racist at all, but I also agree with @Marco that our Western education systems generally put more emphasis on explaining concepts than on rote learning. This, and not just “face”, is the reason why Taiwanese are so afraid of speaking English. I was too, to a certain extent, whenever I had to prepare a composition for that class and sweat for hours finding the right collage of template sentences rather than use my brain and actually “write” it. And TBH, the “template sentence” method is something that I have only seen here.
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Little addition on the “template sentence” method.
I mentioned in another thread that I had bought a Taiwanese coursebook at Elite years back, but eventually gave up learning because it was not useful. That was the reason. The book was just basic vocabulary (numbers, days of the week, etc.) and a sequence of template sentences in “Taiwanese” characters, Chinese characters and romanisation. No grammar points nor explanations of any sort. Depressing.