Of course it’s moot in Taiwan as other than crossing the road there aren’t any threatening situations.
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This you bro?
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If you want to learn TaiJi, I can recommend the Taipei Qin Hall, a beautiful restored old Japanese house, with a nice garden outside.
Separately from their Qin-instrument promotion, one of the members is a very well respected TaiJi teacher, and teaches every weekend in the (covered) garden (paid).
He speaks English if required.
Send me a private message if you want details (I have no commercial interest, just supporting this kind of cultural promotion).
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For an authentic experience and study Wing Chun, show up here:
There is a map on the website.
I did this for a couple of years, years ago.
You can sit aside and watch for free and decide whether you want to sign up. There are no trial lessons, as I remember. Just go there 8PM at night on a weekday and ask to watch. I am not 100% sure this is still there, I have not been in years.
I think it was 4K NTD per month when I joined, but you can come every weekday 10AM-12AM and 8PM-10PM. Often people would still be there until close to 11PM. I used to drop in around 830PM and leave around 10PM.
First 1.5 months you will practice a sort of “kata” on your own. When you get decent at that, you will practice very basic “sticky hands” with someone and it goes on from there to semi-realistic sparring, later wooden dummy, eventually knives and staff.
It takes a minimum of 12years of daily training to learn the whole thing, as I understand. Few students have been here long enough to use knives, but many many students have gone on to start their own schools in other countries.
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Didn’t Miltownkid start a wing chung school or something?
Why?
And why not boxing? A stiff jab will get anyones attention. You really wanna blue belt roll bjj with a stranger onna street? 
And yoga will make you solid, and calm. Good things if you do ever actually need to push someone off you.
And kudos for doing the 1/2 marathon. I did the couch potato to 5k training a few years ago, and barefoot ran before that. We are some crazy apes.
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If you want to get real authentic Chinese martial art training and cultural experience, why not try out the ancient Chinese kungfu passed down by the Shaolin temple, called… karate.
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Absolutely
Many MMA fighters still have a core / primary discipline, but MMA is essentially it’s own discipline - to be successful at higher levels, you have to be well rounded, and MMA classes cover techniques originating from a variety of disciplines.
Absolute horsesh*t. Anything under three hours is good for a novice. Two hours ten is a fantastic time. You should be really proud of your achievement. It’s a great time. 
How to start a martial art? Pick a fight with an expert.
Did you know I’m one of the people that brought the first professional televised MMA fight to Taiwan?
I’m well aware of how MMA works, I’ve been in fights.
Maybe MMA classes are now more refined. Most of them I’ve found to be complete jokes for people that are there as MMA has become trendy. Most fighters I know start with a discipline, but maybe the new generation has changed.
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I have the feeling @Andrew0409 knows his stuff.
But aren’t all martial arts basically fighting with rules?
Great recommendation. I personally wouldn’t mind taking it up myself when we finally get to Taiwan again. Wing Chun is a complete system- steeped in culture and is one that does a competent job of teaching skills for fighting as well. I highly recommend at least trying it out.
What style of Taiji is taught?
On a side note, self defense is a very different approach and mind set than martial arts. It is mostly about awareness, managing fear, and being as destructive as possible in as quickly as possible until an opening to run appears.
It is not fisticuffs, or squaring off to fight. In this world (which is very different than what we grew up in) it is equally likely that the person you are encountering is armed. They have a weapon. Therefore, it is a deadly force encounter. Period. Your life is in danger. Therefore, no technique is off the table, and normal “fighting” is irrelevant. Taken to the ground? Forget grappling. Eye gouge, throat smash, nose bite, do whatever is necessary to escape. Hit with maximum violence and intensity. Get out alive. There will be legal consequences, but you are alive. It is surprising what even a smaller opponent with intensity and true violence can achieve in a short period of time. Real violence is not pretty. Real violence has no art. And martial arts are not the same thing.
Martial arts can help in these situations, but ultimately the street is not a ring, nor a dojo, and it needs to be remembered that martial arts are taken for very different reasons: culture, community, and learning something that can develop over years. This is why in my first response in this thread I asked what the reason was the OP wanted to take martial arts - it is important to know what you are looking for when first starting out.
As for my background, I say this with over 30 years martial art experience - MMA, Kung Fu, Tai chi, and Aikido (as well as dabbling in others). This is in addition to personal knowledge of over a decade of street based, real life violent encounters.
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I didn’t. Very cool.
Then why you asking if there are mma classes and how that would work? They’ve been around for a long time… You’ve been in fights, as in brawls, or you’ve been in a sanctioned mma fight?
It’s definitely changed. I trained bjj on and off at a gym in socal for almost 10 years that has a full stable of mma fighters, including 2 that have had fights in the ufc. I’ve sparred with them (bjj and judo) in their fight preps. The owners are licensed promoters, and were formerly partners with (my first bjj instructor) one of the guys that helped started wolfslair mma. One of the owners (and head instructor) fought in some of the early URCC events. There is essentially no style-vs-style at high level fights anymore, and very few rely primarily on anything that could be described as one discipline (with a very few exceptions, and obviously those guys all cross train now).
Yes, I believe I stated most have a core discipline. But if we really think about it, going way back, many started with their fighting discipline as mma - I’m thinking all the old school wrestlers. They have a core sport, but it’s not really “fighting.” There’s also many who started in something (or were downright awesome at it), and basically you wouldn’t know what their discipline is (a lot of grapplers fall in this category - Belfort, Henderson, Romero…)
Some are fights with rules, some are fancy dances, many are somewhere in between. ;D
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The problem is that what many believe are martial arts, are sports. Once you put on gloves, and limit allowable technique, things change to a great degree. That, and motivation/goals are a large determinating factor.
I will give an interesting anecdote. An FBI agent who was a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu was in an encounter with a guy wanted for murder. The encounter resulted in the agent getting the guy into a lying down arm bar, as is often performed as a finisher. The FBI guy broke the guys arm, after which the bad guy escaped from the lock - and then put a shovel (with his other arm) through the FBI agents chest, killing him.
For example, I think (just my theory here) that Kung Fu styles were much more effective when the goal was killing your opponent. Things like tiger claw strikes, etc., as well as weapon training made a lot of sense pre- modern day.
My point isn’t that everyone needs to become a MMA fighter or a killing machine, but that there other reasons to study martial arts.
Interesting, sure, but is it true? 
something like that should be easy to verify - what’s the agent’s name?
(Edit: if it’s not clear, I’d bet dollars to donuts it’s not true.)
I started to look, but I really don’t want to search through fatality based reports - I don’t have the stomach for it. I wasn’t told this by someone who had any reason to make this up, but if it is really important to you, I will ask to try and find out. I have seen people who are on meth do some very crazy things, that often defy explanation, and often don’t seem possible. The above anecdote is not anywhere outside the realm of possibility.