I think I’m just developing a worse and worse attitude the longer I stay here, but the main reason I stay monolingual is that I really don’t think I have anything to talk about with Taiwanese people. I think because I’m here, I SHOULD learn Chinese, but what’s the point?
I semi-regularly live with Taiwanese people (Taiwanese girlfriend… I’m at least there on weekends, with her family) and they rarely care enough to directly talk to me, or even ask my Taiwanese girlfriend to pass a question on to me. They’re all nice, they’ll take care of me, they’ll give me things, but genuine interest in my life? Ha, yeah right. They won’t understand my questions about their lives if I use English, and they usually interrupt me if I’m speaking English to my girlfriend so she can translate, so it’s nearly impossible to get a question about their lives into the conversation. She’ll just ignore me and pay attention to her family, because they clearly have a higher rank (also they’ll get mad if she doesn’t).
I spend most family gatherings on my cell phone reading books. Her relatives talk to me when they want to improve their English or convince me to improve their kid’s English, effectively making conversation with them the same thing as work.
At work, my students have nothing to say to me, and though I’m desperately trying to move to an acquisition based class, anything I do other than directly read the book is treated as if I’m just wasting their time. They’ll come late because they think I waste time at the beginning and they only care about the book part. They don’t give a crap about input, they’re just trained to follow the book. If I try to help them in any way, they ignore me or retaliate by being extra silent, or push me to focus on the book, even though that’s truly the most useless part of class. They have no grasp of very basic things, but FIGHT if I try to help them improve them. They just want to waste their lives learning a million vocabulary words they’ll never in a million years use properly. Most of them have an English base the size of a pin with a huge load of vocabulary words and useless grammar rules balancing on top of it. Their English crashes and breaks into a million pieces the second they try to open their mouths, so to make sure that doesn’t happen they just never open their mouth! That’d be okay if they’d pay attention to my input, but that’s a waste of their time, so they just choose to never improve.
As a non-speaker of Chinese, my conclusion after about two years of living here is that everyone is a selfish asshole. I think I SHOULD learn Chinese while I’m here, but I have little motivation. I don’t really want to talk with many Chinese speakers, I’m not interested in their TV, their books… I just happened to land here after meeting a girl.
People here have three modes from what I can gather: Zombie, Selfish Asshole, and Oh Shit I Have to Be Polite Or I’ll Lose Face. A bunch of phonies with no personality.
The genuinely nice people I’ve met in Taiwan are extremely few and far between. That’s not limited to natives either, most foreign people duck around a corner or get really shy if they notice they’ve been even spotted by another foreigner. Even my co-workers refuse to say hi unless they’re cornered and can’t slip past without looking rude. Apparently they all like to backstab each other and play stupid games. I have no part in that drama, so they just ignore me. One closed an elevator door on me once. That’s the only interaction I’ve had with that teacher. Foreign people that were polite enough to chat with me generally are just trying to get me to do their work for them. Being in Taiwan for long enough apparently makes most people as selfish as the locals. I pray it never happens to me. So this rules out meeting friendly English speakers. I’m sure they’re out there, but apparently not where I live. I guess if you’re willing to put up with them, the Mormon missionaries will talk to you politely in English. Ha.
What should I talk about with these people? I really only care about talking to my girlfriend in Taiwan, and she can speak English. If we weren’t about to get married I’d be out of here so fast. I’m even worried about marrying her just because I’ll be stuck in or related to Taiwan for the rest of my life, even if I take her back home. The schools here train kids to be soulless zombies, so I definitely don’t want to raise kids here.
I learned bopomofo, but even with that and Pleco, learning is an utter chore. I’m trying to teach my girlfriend about circling so she can give me better input, but she just gives me a million sentences with vocab I don’t know so I’m constantly telling her to slow down because I don’t know what the hell she’s saying. She works a lot and really doesn’t have time to hold my hand through all that. We work on it sometimes, but not enough. She needs to relax in her free time too.
Even with direct access to native speakers it’s pretty tricky to accomplish much. Pimsleur is okay, but then I have no idea how to “spell” words, so I have half-learned words in my head with no tones (sometimes, I can recognize some tones better than others) or character to go along with it, and I really don’t even know bopomofo well enough to look it up other than searching in English and chancing upon the word.
I also don’t have time to take Chinese classes, because I’m busy wasting my time teaching idiots that don’t have any respect for me, and think anything but rote repetition is wasting time. These bores don’t even KNOW HOW to respond to “how are you?” in any way better than “good.” or “fine.”, despite me explaining it over and over and over. It’s just futile to expect them to learn. They come to class with their own attitude on learning (which they refuse to share with me) so whatever I do is wrong. Most of them won’t even lift their head out of their ass or the floor or whatever they’re looking at down there when I enter the room so they can say hello. Most of the rest are too shy to reply when I say hi. Talkative people just want to show off to everyone and get pissy and bored when I try to help anyone else… Taiwan’s students really are the worst, and the longer I stay here the more I think it’s just an intrinsic part of the culture. Just look at the traffic here. That alone shows you what’s in their heart: ME FIRST. ME ME ME. OUTTA MY WAY.
I really enjoy helping people but most of them pay money to fight me to NOT help them (I really really wonder if these people are literally insane; they try to learn English the same way over and over with no change in results and refuse to even consider another way). Kids are out of control spoiled hellions, teenagers have already lost their soul and do literally nothing but sit around zonked out from all the studying, adults are zombies or selfish pricks… Where’s my motivation to learn a language to facilitate communication with them? They don’t want to talk with me anyway, they want to practice their English with me if I DON’T want them to speak English. They’re silent if I do. Talking to them is a waste of time.