Where do you live? I find this isnt even remotely the case in Taipei/new Taipei.
It certainly isn’t the case in my classes, which is rather disheartening given that my students are English majors.
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New Taipei.
Hmm well interesting. I’ve found that setting matters a lot. For example near my university campus nearly everyone speaks English, but outside of there I find many others cannot. Seems to be English speaking pockets from what I can tell. Another one would be tienmu
My main point: make your own school where you are the boss and only student - for Chinese or anything else
People want intensive or immersive experience. Some schools such as ICLP title a program “Immersion” and charge you a big fee accordingly. But it’s you decide if it’s an immersion program.
If you do something intensely you are too busy to be distracted. You are immersed.
Fast pace is essential. If you are working on X and take a break to do Y you leave your immersion program. Stop studying X to surf media about Y then you left your immersion program. You can easily hire a teacher. Whatever someone agrees to is a sufficient wage. They just need to speak Chinese, not be a tenured university professor.
Supply and demand: 24 million people in Taiwan could teach you. Only a few want a teacher. Don’t overpay
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That was an excellent post
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Yes, if that’s the goal, you need fast pace and working “sideways”, rather than “up”. You want to keep getting input, but that doesn’t mean flying through one chapter of a typical Chinese language textbook per day. By “sideways” I mean getting more language related to the topic you read about (or at least something using the same characters as your previous lesson, which is much harder to do.). If you just read about natural disasters (one of the lessons in Contemporary Chinese 4), grab the elementary school first grade 社會 textbook and listen to and follow along with the text about earthquake preparedness. Understood 100% of that lesson? Second grade’s 社會 textbook also has a lesson about earthquake preparedness. Can you understand the CWB’s website in Chinese when it comes to earthquakes? If not, figure out what if it you need to know and learn that(Etc). (TBH, as much as I HATE 康軒‘s English textbooks with all my soul, for ppl at an HSK 4 level or so, starting from the first grade 康軒 國語 and 社會 textbooks, working through them cover to cover, is actually a really good supplement to whatever “adult” Chinese learning materials you’re using. If you can handle the childish voices, much of the text is recorded and available on an app). Regardless, the more you see related language together with language you read, the more time your brain has to process that information. That works better than a program like ICLP anyway. I bought some of their textbooks and it’s just like the program I did in Beijing — you jump from one topic to the next, absolutely getting whiplash in the process. Those textbooks have no system that allows for real use of the language before moving onto the next (completely irrelevant) topic. If you take time to dive deep into a single topic (or work your way through elementary school textbooks from first grade on up, cover to cover), you can really process new words and how they are used in different contexts.
If you want to know about Cold Character reading, just ask me. I’m the originator.
That’s a strategy to implement from the beginning, though. It’s difficult or impossible to use effectively with “sloshers” (people with a lot of memorized bits of Chinese just sloshing around in their brains). For that, to solidify their grammar and word usage, the best strategy is massive reading at or BELOW their level (hard to come by, especially in the context of a language school in Taiwan) or the same type of conversational interaction.
I’ve used italki often in the past for various languages, but the only way I was ultimately satisfied with the process was to sign up with someone who didn’t claim to be a teacher, just a well-meaning native speaker with reasonable English (or some other language I felt fully fluent in; I did this for Cantonese through Mandarin) and ask them to do precisely what I wanted done. Slow speech. Repetition of everything I said in the correct form (recasting). Asking every question it’s possible to ask about a single sentence.
I’m prejudiced obviously but finding a competent (that’s a big one) teacher who knows Comprehensible Input for Mandarin is the fastest way forward – UNTIL you have automatic, unconscious control of all the structure/grammar of Mandarin. After that it’s just a vocab and collocation building exercise, and really someone who has truly acquired all the grammar is like a tiny, socially-isolated native speaker who just needs to get out and listen to/read the world.
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You can get to a point where people understand you, but you are making mistakes all over the place. A while back I was watching television with some Taiwanese, there was this Caucasian guy on this program, some sort of adventure type show where he runs about some drab looking Taiwanese countryside from checkpoint to checkpoint, all the while speaking Taiwanese with his co-contestants. Different language, but still relevant. No doubt this guy has amazing ability to even reach this level of competency. However I was curious as to how good he was, was he indistinguishable from a native, as he sounded to my clueless ear? I was watching with some Taiwanese, and after punching through the usual polite platitudes a bit with some persistence, when pressed, they said that although he was fluent, there were a significant amount of mistakes in his tones, and quite noticeably different from a native speaker. I guess this was a very formative moment for me, because it taught me that as your confidence grows, you still need to hone, and that it will never come naturally. And due to some cultural reasons here, you will probably never even find out about it, if you indeed are making little mistakes.
So italki will help you get to the competency level I suppose. Problem with the Taiwanese on italki is they are all annoyingly competent in English, so you know what is going to happen, exactly what happens on the street here. If you say “can you please repeat that?”, the conversation turns to English (or sign language) straight away.