Can foreign students live in Taiwan speaking only English especially in Taipei and Taichung?
Yes.
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yes, but wont always be easy.
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It depends what and where you’re studying. A few schools have English-only programs, and you’ll be able to manage. Otherwise, no.
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I only speak English and it’s 100% fine. Rarely do I even need to use Google Tranbslate to communicate with someone, as most people I actually need to talk to (ie anyone at a store that’s not a convenience store) can speak English.
Yeah Taipei has more English, but I’ve spent weeks in total in other cities and it’s been fine.
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It can be, yes, but what are you studying?
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ohhh, if he means at school, not just life in general, I have no experience with that
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You’ll be ok, but it’s only the respectful thing to do to teach yourself the basics of Mandarin. Plenty of countries in the West where people snarl “Learn our language or go back to where you’re from!” while their kids go for an exchange semester in the East and laugh of the locals speaking a language they don’t understand.
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I want to study International Business
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Then you should get cracking on Mandarin learning
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Come on. The world is bigger than the PRC, right?
And if Xi’s regime doesn’t cool down some of the Mandarin fever we’ve seen, I’m not sure what will. 
Guy
I believe there are university programs where you can do that. But although the textbooks will be in English, and the course will nominally be in English, many of the professors will often be speaking in Chinese, and the conversation between classmates will I suspect be almost entirely in Chinese. University administration will also be almost entirely in Chinese. Day to day life, you can totally get by with only very basic Chinese (I’m certainly evidence of that!), but it won’t exactly be an optimal university experience.
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Universities will lie and say their programs are in English, when they aren’t.
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Have you thought about the intention behind that snarl you mention?Frankly I wish they would make that snarl here. It indicates some desire for people to fit in, to speak a common language.
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The trouble is who determines what that “common language” is.
New bosses have showed up in Taiwan roughly every 50 years to switch up the language of power. This has had consequences!
Guy
You think that mandarin won’t be the common language in the future?
I agree, I don’t think there an appetite now for switching things up yet again in Taiwan. My point however is that imposing this foreign language (i.e. Mandarin) on the people of Taiwan was greatly damaging, as any educated forumosan will know.
For the future: we’ll see where the current Bilingual 2030 initiative leads (likely nowhere, but this is not yet determined).
Guy
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Hopefully the bilingual stuff works. I hope it does.
People should make a go of learning some mandarin though, you are going to have a better experience
I’m wondering if there is a more pointless language than Mandarin to learn for international business.
Why?
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