tl;dr: Please help me think of jobs where I can continue to develop my Mandarin skills and integrate more into Taiwanese society.
I’m not fishing for interviews/offers (yet), I’m more thinking broad stroke: what industries or professions should I consider looking into? What jobs have you worked here that really helped you integrate?
Background:
My wife and I moved from the US to Taipei about a year ago with plans to stay indefinitely, and I’ve been taking Mandarin classes at NTNU since then. My Chinese has improved a lot, and I passed the C1 TOCFL exam in March. My class ends this month, and I think the best thing for me now would be to find a job where I can use my language skills outside of the classroom.
I currently do some part-time software freelancing, so I’m mostly looking for another part-time opportunity.
Qualifications:
Native English speaker, TOCFL C1 Mandarin, DELE C1 Spanish.
Master’s degree in computer science from a good university in the US.
Close to a decade of work experience in software.
Some teaching experience from my university days.
ARC and legal clearance to work.
Additional considerations:
Lukewarm on more software/programming. I already spend a lot of time on my computer with my freelancing gig, though I would consider it if it checks my other boxes.
Lukewarm on teaching English. Would consider it if the work environment is fully in Mandarin outside of the classroom. Does anyone have experience with this type of gig?
Current ideas:
Tourism industry? I’m sure my background and language skills would be valuable here.
Barista? This would be great if it means I get to talk to a bunch of different people. I also have some experience from college.
Teaching computer science (in Mandarin)? I assume schools requires some sort of license, not sure what that entails. Also not confident my Mandarin is good enough to teach yet.
The traditional way to improve your mandarin here in a work environment was to work in a trading company as an English secretary. I worked for about five coming up and it was a huge help especially as I never went to school here. But I fear those days are over.
Working for a local SME will definitely help a lot given you already have an excellent base , I also did the same thing but the other way around i.e. learned Chinese after working for SMEs.
I’m not sure if working for a larger company will help as a lot of them speak excellent English but it might and the conditions will be better , usually.
Tourism , maybe if you are dealing with Taiwanese tourists otherwise waste of time. If you do figure that out like teaching scuba or bringing them snorkeling or paddle boarding or surfing yeah it could work to a degree, especially if you were living with Taiwanese as well who didn’t speak English much .
-1 on anything teaching English related. You will likely be required to only speak English in the workplace.
With your experience, look for international tech companies: Google, Amazon, Micron, Microsoft, Facebook. The emails and work material will be in English but meetings and work environment will be in Mandarin.
Regardless, you might also consider living outside of Taipei. Other cities have fewer foreigners and lower levels of English which forces you to learn things and express yourself using Mandarin (or Taîgí) much more often.
My fear is that since I’m a native English speaker, I’ll be forced on to a team that operates mostly in English. I’m strictly worse at my job in Chinese, so if they have two openings and one is with other English speakers, I have a feeling I’ll be pushed in that direction. Still worth considering, especially as the pay/benefits will be better.
This is a good option I think. Probably a real crash course in how Taiwanese businesses operate as well.
This is what I’m leaning towards now. If I can be the only or one of a few English speakers then I’ll have no choice but to improve my Chinese.
Good advice. My wife’s work is currently in Taipei but there’s a good chance we’d have an opportunity to do this in the future.
If you have an open work permit, part time job in the service industry is the best answer. As an example, I worked at a tea shop for a Summer, and my Chinese got infinitely better because of it. It’ll be hard at first, but you’ll get used to it quickly, and people will generally be patient with you.
Well if that’s your fear, then definitely try not to do anything English teaching-related.
Also, my point is that for the examples I mentioned - larger international tech companies - they do not have “local English-speaking teams”. They have local Mandarin-speaking teams who need to work with other offices in Japan, Singapore, USA, Europe, etc., and it is very helpful to have a native English speaker who is technically capable and literate. I had a previous position like that: I was a local engineer, same as my coworkers, 90% of the time working in Mandarin, and then we had once-weekly sync-up meetings with the US teams. Not having great Mandarin was fine since I improved over time, and being an English speaker was quite a boon for the team to prevent misunderstandings and help parse technical documents.
I say go for either Marketing job (export import included. B2B / B2C jobs) or Restaurant Manager (choose high end restaurants, that needs your language skills).
Both has the opportunity for you to sharpen your Mandarin in terms of either formal and soft spoken mandarin. And also pushes you to write all the necessary documents for project planning.
Many, many years ago, I taught English to Korean kids. I spoke to them in Korean to explain everything. I was also big on orally going through lists of vocabulary words (names of insects, colors, months of the year type of thing). I would say the word in Korean and the kids would have to say the word in English. My Korean got a big boost from this experience. I wasn’t trying to do this to improve my Korean, but it worked out that way.
I actually found my Chinese improved quite a bit as a result of taking an English teaching job. Admittedly listening more than anything else. That’s mainly just a result of being surrounded by it constantly (and making an effort to try understand what was being said). I do think it’s easier to understand children, too, so that makes it easier to take it in and learn (that’s my hunch anyway). I suppose I also came to understand language and language acquisition better through teaching English, and I think that was a small added bonus to my Chinese, too.
I’m not sure whether it’s the best job for improving your Mandarin if that’s your main objective, and the opportunities to practice speaking are more limited unless you insist on using it with co-workers, but in my experience it definitely works.
Work with a local dealer or SME will be the fastest way. Note though that a lot of it will be business based vocab :).
One of the problems I had was them switching to Taiwanese when they got excited or wanted to exclude me or others. I think Taiwanese speakers are fewer and fewer though these days.
I think that right around C1 is when it gets pretty tricky to plan to just generally improve at a target language without focusing on a particular domain. I guess the best way to do it would be to have conversations on a wide variety of topics with as wide a variety of people as possible. The first jobs that come to mind would be a barista (at a smaller, independent coffee shop) or a bartender. Weekends would probably be busy, but if you choose the right place, I bet you could have decent conversations with customers on weekdays. Not having to worry about money would obviously make this easier.
I think the travel industry is also an interesting idea, since I’ve often had more interesting conversations when traveling around the island than in Taipei. It’s easy to imagine a foreigner running a 民宿 or bar in the right location somewhere in the countryside would be constantly chatting with Taiwanese. But if you want to live in Taipei, I’m not sure how well it would work. I think the tourist industry in Taipei is pretty much all foreigner based.
Besides that, I guess having some idea of what domain you might want to focus on would make it a lot easier to figure out options.
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