I’ve been awarded one of those “Taiwan scholarships”, and will start with a year of Mandarin before going on to an M.A. program. Teco just informed me that “the terms of agreement doesn’t mention anything about a minimum number of class hours per week/month/year.” This leads me to believe that the minimum number of class hours are set by the individual universities, i.e. the required number of class hours can vary widely. Tzu Chi University’s language center informed me that scholarship students must attend class three hours a day, but that sounds like a bit much, especially since I’d have to take a private class. Would anyone happen to know anything about how different universities deal with this part of the scholarship?
Many thanks!
I don’t know how good your Mandarin is right now, but if it’s not very strong, you would be well-advised to take all teh classes they want you to and then your private arrangements.
The “Taiwan Scholarships” are famous for bringing students in from abroad with zero or almost no Chinese, dropping them into a language school for a year, and then expecting them to be able to do MA-level work in Chinese. That is just not going to happen, realistically.
I’d take the year of language, and then seriously evaluate your abilities. If they’re not up to snuff, consider abandoning the scholarship and taking another year of Chinese, then applying for grad school on your own (not difficult). After the first year, you’re practically guaranteed a scholarship if you still have a pulse and a foreign passport. 
You’d have to make shift for te two years in between but it might be better than failing out of the MA program in the first place if that was a possibility.
If you’ve got a LEP one from the Ministry of Education, then the maximum number of hours that you can miss from your language program is 10 hours per month. The repercussions will depend on whether your language school reports this to the MOE. If they do, then your scholarship will be cut for the next month.
They can be pretty strict about this, I know a few people whose money has been docked. When I asked for four extra hours in a month to get married, they refused. However, when a classmate asked for six extra hours off to support his Taiwanese wife through a greencard application they allowed it.
There’s no mention of how many hours you can miss when doing the university/masters/doctorate part. I guess you can do what you want as long as you get the required grades.
The guidelines are here: tw.org/scholarship/2006_guidelines.pdf
The grade requirements for the MA can actually be rather challenging to maintain, depending on the program. Grades do not tend to be inflated in Taiwan as in the US (often). Also, quite often you start with an 82 to begin with on your “comportment” grade (I am not making this up) so if you need to keep an 85 you’re already under the curve to begin with. The 82 seems to be a standard grade they just gave everyone at the university I was at (because if they had graded my comportment based on what they thought of it I’d probably have gotten like a 35.)
Normally you’re just required to attend the language program, without missing more than 10 hrs a week. At most universities that would mean 10 hrs a week of Chinese class.
As for giving up a Taiwan scholarship later for a scholarship awarded by the university, I’d consider the fact that Taiwan scholarships for graduate students are at 30,000/month, while (here I can only speak for one uni, NCCU in Taipei, though) the scholarships awarded by the schools themselves were lowered last year to 15,000 a month, and whereas they used to be awarded for a whole year, they are now awarded per semester and you need to compete every semester again. Unless you’re Korean or Japanese, you’re usually favored by distribution quota and don’t need to compete that hard, but I’d stick to the Taiwan scholarship which is more stable (school’s finances won’t affect the amount of money you get), it can be prolonged fairly easy and it also allows easier access to the job market here after graduation. Some regulations regarding Taiwanese scholarship graduates and work permits have been passed (so I’ve been told by my local Taipei Rep Office), but not sure if anyone knows more about this? (hm…bit off topic maybe)