Was his English rather basic? Usually when this happens with people who clearly have basic English I’m totally cool with it. What pisses me off is when people with good English (and strong yank accents) do it. I feel personally insulted, like they deem my Chinese to not be good enough. When that happens i don’t really know how to react i just get moody and barely say anything to them.
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But it’s not just the characters. It’s also the tones. I just made a mistake with one an hour ago that was serious enough to impede understanding. I’m told my tones are pretty good but I couldn’t clearly distinguish the tones when other people were speaking until about 25 years into my quest for enlightenment.
People claim that Mandarin’s grammar is easy or even that it doesn’t have grammar at all. I have to steel myself for the a steady stream of sometimes fluent but ungrammatical output from these overly-confident people who don’t know what they don’t know. Mandarin does have a grammar but it requires you to learn a whole new way of thinking about grammar (topic prominence, operations of particles etc).
A related difficulty is usage. It sometimes seems like every Chinese word has its own special way or ways to use it. There are often secondary or tertiary meanings that I learn only much later.
There are almost no words other than nouns that have a direct corollary in English. There are no ‘friends’, true or false, as there are in French and Spanish. The classical substrate pokes its head up all the time and it isn’t Greek or Latin.
There are chengyu, tons of ever-changing slang, and all foreign transliterated words like names of countries have to be painfully learned one by one.
Then there’s the extremely high context way the language works–this is probably a cultural dimension of the langauge. Plus lots of history and cultural references that we don’t get unless we work at them.
Classic essay/lament
https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
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Well it should be clear from the conversation right.
Boring vs Bored is the point of the whole story Rick!
My kids loved it when I was telling them what just happened at FamilyMart lol.
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MTC is by far Taiwan’s most useless programme. Did 8 semesters.
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I did even more for my sins. I think 10? Paid full price too. I was using it for my visa for the last year so I have an excuse.
I agree in many respects it was really a case of grinding it out and still to this day my tones are pretty shit (for somebody who can read a newspaper slowly ) and I cannot read BoPoMoFo.
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I think they should compensate us for the trauma of being subjected to their ‘teaching’
I wouldn’t recommend MTC to my worst enemy. It’d be considered a Geneva conventions violation.
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They seem to think students will learn to speak correct Chinese magically without any of their effort.
It’s like you are all supposed to be huaqiao already or something. It’s easy for them to then just go back to their rinse and repeat daily writing tests.
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I hear you but the cold hard truth is that their English is probably better than your Mandarin so they opt to speak in the language that is most likely to promote efficient communication. This may have to do with a cultural preference or taste for (perceived) efficiency.
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Yeah I remember how much they fawned over the Japanese/Vietnamese/Korean students because they already had a leg up from their youth and stupid foreigner over here was asking questions that supposedly are obvious from the get go.
While simultaneously practising no phonics. So the Japanese guy gets 90% on the test but goes around saying the weather is happy.
Laoshee! Tianchee Tai Le!
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The problem is that you are not suppose to ask questions even when they invite you to.
And that right there is why it’s the most useless programme in the country. Don’t give MTC your hard earned money.
Chengyu are very challenging and I get lost when they start throwing them around. Yes there are levels of chinese I will not even get close to but I’m ok with that. I already put a lot of work and time jnto it and now I prefer to learn other things , sure I can still put some time into improving it but it’s a function of the law of diminishing returns with regards my personal development , career objectives and most importantly having time to just chill 
.
I realise for some of us it’s very important to have high level Chinese .
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I hated this and it is true. But it is also true that I learned to speak reasonably correct Mandarin in spite of their efforts. You have to learn it yourself. No one can teach you in the end. The two hours in class every day just ensures that you are focused on Chinese for at least 30-50 minutes per day. That regular exposure is essential.
Then why am I paying them money?
I am there to learn.
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Yes I learned it myself obviously too.
It’s just they don’t help so it takes wayyyyy longer than it should. And they don’t correct your pronunciation, essentially I feel they are lazy.
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OK. And in about 99% of cases become one of those foreigners who has been here for a decade, can only speak survival Chinese, is illiterate, and depends on their wife or girlfriend to do everything for them.
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Harsh but true.
The number of foreigners who are literate in Chinese is miniscule .
I’d say for every foreigner who can speak very basic Chinese only 10% can read it to any functional degree because of the time , effort and money involved to do it. I gave up at least a year’s full time income and another year’s part-time income to do it.
That’s why so many Taiwanese seem shocked when they see me reading stuff I guess. It really is like having keys to their kingdom and some of them don’t even like it lol.
I didn’t know MTC was the only programme in the entire country.
Spend your hard earned money somewhere else. Never at MTC.
I agree with this. Although my first teacher in university corrected my tones so much that I had nightmares about it. Overcoming this trauma took a lot of time.
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I looked for this kind of teacher for a long time and never found one.