Decade-Seasoned in Taiwan and Monolingual

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
21

[quote=“ehophi”]I’ve been sifting through applicants lately, and I’ve noticed a few things about these seasoned teachers. None of them have learned much Mandarin in that much time, which leads me (under “head instructor” authority) to pose to the owners that someone who lives in a country for a decade, but fails to learn a local language, probably doesn’t know much about learning languages well, and thus must not have much to impart.

Fair? Unfair?[/quote]

Fair: learning the official language in a place where you’re staying is sorta given.

Unfair: Chinese isn’t an easy language to learn.

22

[quote=“PigBloodCake”]
Unfair: Chinese isn’t an easy language to learn.[/quote]
Really? Speaking Chinese is very easy. Reading and writing, maybe not so, but becoming functionally fluent in Chinese is a fucking breeze.

Taiwanese is harder, but LOADS more fun. :thumbsup:

23

My school has had an on-going problem hiring decent teachers, and my DOS has been sifting through lots of resumes, and the issue is more a case of seasoned teachers in Taiwan applying for positions, bags of experience, but no recognised qualifications. I don’t give two hoots whether the teacher is monolingual.

24

If you think Chinese is tough, you should try learning English as a second language. All the “words that go together” is a nightmare for someone to learn.

25

I think they’re equally tough, and part of the reason their so tough is because they’re so disimilar. I think tenses are tough in English, and it’s not really spelled phonetically, so that’s hard. But man, I can’t even seem to get past the phoneme in Chinese.

26

Chinese is a relatively easy language to pick up if you are learning it and using it every day. However, for some people, myself included, it does require time and effort. I would love to take 6 months + from teaching and study Chinese properly, but realistically I will have to get by on what I have acquired over the years. Like a previous poster has mentioned, if you are teaching 30 + hrs a week, it’s hard to devote yourself to serious Chinese studying.

27

I think they’re equally tough, and part of the reason their so tough is because they’re so disimilar. I think tenses are tough in English, and it’s not really spelled phonetically, so that’s hard. But man, I can’t even seem to get past the phoneme in Chinese.[/quote]

You’re all missing my point. You’re trying to learn. Stop trying to learn, and try to acquire, and see how much easier it is. That’s what your brain is missing.

The reason you could get farther in Italian than in Chinese in the same time is that Italian is more easily comprehended, thus you were receiving more comprehensible input. Generally speaking, people aren’t going to jump in and just “get” Chinese (though some do); it’s better to provide an optimized experience of immersion with genuinely comprehensible input. If the input is genuinely comprehensible, and there is enough repetition, the brain will acquire the language. That, and let go of the constant analysis. Don’t even utter the word “phoneme” until you can speak and understand the basics. :smiley:

28

Well there is always the problem of actually finding somebody who will want to speak Chinese to you or can hold their own end of the conversation , that’s a whole other story!
Picking up English is much easier in an English speaking country, nobody is going to be screeching crap at you in Japanese or Chinese every five minutes.

29

True dat. :slight_smile:

30

The weird thing is that I seem to be able to understand a lot more Chinese than I can speak. I can pretty much follow someone else’s entire conversation in Chinese, but I struggle to actually make any sort of contribution; I guess that’s cos I don’t get a whole lot of practice because, yes, people are always talking at me in Chinglish. Once you’ve got the basics though (and I agree with ironlady that ‘learning’ is not the correct approach), vocab acquisition does need some sort of formalized practice.

31

The Money Quote right here! Getting someone who will actually talk to you in Chinese. Oh, I can dream such dreams.

32

I met most applicants at the interviews. I haven’t even responded to people who just sent resumes. There were enough people who were already here.

Beyond that, I’m with ironlady, that Chinese is just a language, but disagree in that there’s a clear learning curve between ENG-ZHW and ENG-ESP if you account for full literacy (reading AND writing) into knowledge of a language.

Personally, I’ve been here a year, and was “the second-best foreign Chinese speaker they’d ever had working there,” which isn’t much, really. The owners are confident enough in my comprehension to routinely converse with me in Mandarin, and I get about 30% to 100% of the conversation, depending on the topic and breadth of the discussion. I’ve been here just over one year, any my background was in ancient Chinese before I came here, so only helped with the reading, initially.

To their credit, I don’t work more than twenty hours per week, and I spend almost all of my free weeknights reading, programming, dating, and doing most other things in Mandarin. But I also don’t go to classes, and I make or “borrow” all of the materials that I use to practice. That’s why I’m amazed, given the wealth of free tools, information, and so forth, that one couldn’t have time in a decade to learn the immersed language.

There’s some level of ritualism that’s involved in any practice (even mundane activities, like grooming and shopping). I think ironlady has a unique sense of “formalism” that she combats, which is more in my line of fire, as she disputes the instructional value of generating and outlaying of formal grammars to explain natural languages.

Most of what I know about vocabulary acquisition revolves around repetition and association, and is mostly a short-term vs. long-term memory issue. But people have already seized on that research and made various algorithms that attempt to guess when you will probably forget something. I’m doing that Goldlist method for an experiment, but the principles behind it are not so different from those of the Leitner method or the Mnenosyne project.

33

There are actually plenty of [strike]hot Taiwanese women[/strike] eager english students who will [strike]hook up with you[/strike] meet for language exchange if you want to practice Chinese. It does actually work, as long as you take it seriously and meet someone that you can genuinely have a conversation with.

34

It doesn’t surprise me at all that people don’t learn Chinese here. In most jobs, people are actively discouraged (if not punished) for any Chinese in the class (from them or their students). Then, after the grind of a buxiban job, the last thing they want to do is spend their free time studying. Many, perhaps even most, foreigners working as English teachers here spend the majority of their free time associating with other non-Chinese speakers. Especially in the north, Taiwanese will often speak entirely in English to a foreigner. Even where I live, this happens to some extent. I had to go to a government office yesterday and the guy there didn’t say one word of Chinese to me. He did all of this without me even prompting him.

As such, the amount of Chinese input (not even comprehensible Chinese input, just the amount of Chinese input) is often next to nothing for many people here.

I am still not even remotely close to being fluent, but I am sure my Chinese comprehension has shot up this year because I do allow/use Chinese in the classroom, and because I actively listen to the responses my students give to me in Chinese (they’re allowed to answer my English questions in Chinese if I’m checking comprehension and I never force English output) or the translations they give to each other. This kind of environment simply never occurs for most people teaching English here, regardless of how long they’ve been here. How much English do you think a dishwasher living, working and generally interacting in a Chinatown in the West is going to have after ten years?

35

Add to that that large swathes of the population don’t speak Mandarin as their native dialect, then you start to get the picture. The ones that have travelled and got an education and have a more worldy view (and therefore you would think would have plenty to converse with in Chinese beyond ‘ni shi mei guo ren ma’) inevitably tend to use English when conversing, or actively look to take the opportunity. Due to the lack of Westerners here I can see why they are anxious to do that but it can be pretty tedious. But even among my Hakka in-laws who mostly have not completed 3rd level education, they like to ask can I help with speaking English with their kids. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.
Then from Miaoli County down the usage of Mandarin starts getting pretty dodgy!

36

During my younger days at my college town, I have worked with quite a few of those cook, dishwashers who speak very little English. But the moment they step out of the restaurant kitchen, they will have to use their broken English to deal with unhappy customers; buy bus tickets to go back to their place; talk to Mexicans and other immigrants who are not from Chinese speaking countries. As soon as you can carry on simple English, you can get a waiter or delivery job which get paid more with tips. So, there is an incentive to learn English as fast as possible.

So, having an incentive to learn anything is important. English teachers who do not learn Chinese in Taiwan have no such incentive, I guess.

37

There is a small incentive to learning Chinese in Taiwan for people who teach English for their day job. But there is often more incentive to just speak English as that is what their customers want to hear.

38

fh2000: That’s probably the crux of it then. Most foreigners here who have been here for longer than six months can speak survival Chinese. They can tell someone how to get to their apartment, they can order a train ticket, they can say they don’t want milk in their coffee, etc. I have a friend here who absolutely goes out of his way not to speak Chinese. Yet even he can understand some basic stuff and he always manages to get where he needs to in a taxi. We’ve both been here exactly the same length of time, and it embarrasses even me just how little Chinese he speaks, yet he’s still alive almost five years since he arrived. People here are certainly more accommodating than they would be in my country if someone started barking at them in Chinese all the time and refused to even attempt to speak English.

39

I think they’re equally tough, and part of the reason their so tough is because they’re so disimilar. I think tenses are tough in English, and it’s not really spelled phonetically, so that’s hard. But man, I can’t even seem to get past the phoneme in Chinese.[/quote]

You’re all missing my point. You’re trying to learn. Stop trying to learn, and try to acquire, and see how much easier it is. That’s what your brain is missing.
[/quote]

I have to admit that Ironlady hit the nail on this one. Stop trying to 學 a language and try to 吸收 the language.

40

People do learn in different ways and different languages pose different challenges. Example:

My wife and my Hebrew:

Wife: fluent speaking, sounds like an Israeli (every Israeli she speaks to thinks she is a native) fluent listening, understanding, conversation, news, tv, etc. She can of course read, but the more formal tone of written language in books, newspapers and academic articles is hard for her.

Me: The exact opositte. OK speaking, like I can get around Israel without a problem, but a lot of common, everyday nouns I always forget for some reason. People on the news tend to speak to fast for me (as do many Israelis when they just go on and on). But I can read the real heady stuff, academic articles, books, etc. My grammar and spelling are much more correct than my wife’s (or most Israelis who speak quite incorrectly). I have taught Hebrew at both the graduate and undergraduate levels…taken immersion, lived in Israel, etc. But for the life of me I cannot become fluent in “street Hebrew”. However, if you want me to break down the development of a word from biblical, through rabbinic, to medieval and then modern usage, giving all the nuances, then I am your man. if you want directions to the grovery store in Hebrew, ask my wife :doh:

So now thinking of Chinese:

My wife hears a word, remembers how to say it, tone, meaning, etc. Me, I gotto see the character, look at the makeup of the combined radicals, etc.

So my wife is much more of the “absorber” type, me…my brain simply does not work that way. So for learning Chinese, unfortunately, it takes quite a lot of drilling down with the characters and vocab. For someone like me, Chinese does pose more of a difficulty…or perhaps not a difficulty but there is an extra time commitment due to the character system.

So essentially, I think some languages are ‘harder’ (takes more of a time commitment) for people and some are ‘easier’ (less of a time commitment) for others.

If you have lived here ten years and cannot hold a conversation, however, I think that says more about your priorities (whether you really cared about learning the language or not) than it does about you as a teacher. Not all good teachers are good students…