Help Choosing a language school

good god miltown!!! nOOOOOOOOO keep away from there, full of people only interested in visas…hence they only show up a couple of times a week thuis slowing down the overall pace of the class considerably…my flatmate goes there and hes been there for 6 months and knows dick all, also they use the shi da texts, his class is only on lesson seven right now…there are meant to be taught at a rate of one per week. im at shi da and while i agree wholeheartedly that the admin there is a complete shambles. i am and have been learning an awful lot over the last 4 weeks since i began. sure there is writing and reading but overall i would have to say it is fairly balanced (from the point of view that im a visual learner and the teacher is very good), in addition, there is a real college type atmosphere that only helps things along, people from all over the place speaking in chinese to each other. i would have to reccomend shi da.

Yeah, CLD probably doesn’t compare to a university course, but it or TLI are your only options of you want evening classes. Most people are there for visas, but if they didn’t want the classes they’d save 1000NT a month by going to (or more to the point, not going to CLI). At CLD you are only allowed to miss 6 classes a month. If you’ve been there a while they migth give you some leeway, but they used to be fairly strict. The Shida books which are sposd to be taught onbe lesson a week - week got tauhgt at about a lesson every two weeks more or less. I was there a year and got up to Lesson 6 of book 2. However, all of that was about 3 years ago, so it might have changed.

brian

Thanks for your concern. :laughing:
I’ll still go have a look at the classes and see what they’re all about. Shouldn’t hurt to look (hopefully). I’m looking for something that would help me skip the first and possibly second Shida books. From the results of my language school searching, I’ll probably stick to my plan of going to Shida in August. If CLD turns out to be as good as you (Southpaw) say it is, I’ll probably start looking for a (serious) one on one teacher.

What kinds of part time jobs can you get where you can practice Chinese? Do you mean something like working as a street vendor? It’s an interesting idea but I had never thought of it seriously because the pay is so low.

You can practice your Chinese at almost any job. The best for this purpose are probably “english Specialist” type jobs where you edit English.

yo feiren,

any advice for scoring one of those “english specialist” jobs? that sounds like it would work perfectly in my schedule and my ideas about language acquisition.

if you’ve any info you’d like to share…

Count me in too. Any tips on how to find decent-paying (or even interesting) part-time work doing Chinese-English translation or English editting would be appreciated.

Try www.104.com.tw. Search for editor or other key words in English.

I studied at Wen Hua Da Xue for a term last summer at it was fine.

The two teachers that I had were good and the class sizes were small. We used the normal text but also spent a lot of time just chating because we got through the book quickly. After each term you sign up for a new class so will probably get different teacher. Most of the students there are from Asian countries.

It also does English evening classes which is handy because you can get to meet people for language exchange

It was also a lot cheaper than Shida!

can someone give me a link to ‘Shida’?

mtc.ntnu.edu.tw/index.html

Hey Miltownkid, i was wondering if you picked a school yet? I know you were looking for evening classes. So am I. I think i can skip book 1 & 2 of Practical Audio as well. My problem is I learnt manadarin in Canada where they follow the Mainland style of teaching. I actually really enjoyed my chinese classes. Right now I can’t read a lot of characters because they’re all writing traditionally and i only know simplified. My spoken is much better than my written but that can improve quite quickly.

Does anyone want to hook up for evening classes?? I find that i learn much better with other students. One on one is only good if the teacher is prepared and ready to teach a solid session. But really i rather be with other students, I enjoy the social aspect of class too :slight_smile:

Rose

Yep. I’ve been going for 2 months now. forumosa.com/3/viewtopic.php?t=1515&start=15
I’m going to be switching to 1 on 1 next month. Guoyuribao is nice, but there aren’t a lot of students there so it’s hard to find a nice fit. If you find 2 other people at your level you can enjoy the group rates. The group class I’m leaving is very nice and the teacher is good.