I completely agree, Shi-Da MTC is by far the most unreliable school to sign up for . The people in the office are rude, and very dismissive, they do not communicate with each other efficiently when there is an important matter, the teachers are RUDE and racist . They do not respond to emails effectively at all, and the people in the office are just absolutely USELESS!! EXAMPLE; 1) . One of the teachers was ( I kid you not ) stomping her feet outside a classroom door because the students in there were not fast enough to come out of the classroom.2 ) I will not put a name but I know of a teacher who made racist snide comments to my fellow classmates who is of a darker skin complexion. WHAT. That is unprofessional, rude, and childish for anyone not only a teacher!! 3 ) The books are expensive, I don’t know why the school does not provide books given the amount that students pay for the school fees. I simply do not understand why someone should feel so uncomfortable learning from this school with the kind of system they have and staff. I do not recommend anyone to apply for this school because you will end up disappointed like me.
I was super happy to come here and learn, but the whole attitude from the school really put me off, and I hope they can improve everything.
I went to NTNU MTC for two sessions back in 2007. I had already studied a bit in the US, so they put me in level 2. This first session was really difficult for me but the teacher and the students were great. I learned so much in that time. I was also working 50+ hours per week so I couldn’t dedicate as much time as I wanted to study. The second session’s teacher sucked so bad that I was going to just walk out. Every morning, the teacher would start out criticizing students about things you can’t do anything about. For example, one girl had bad acne, and the teacher told her she had bad skin because she didn’t drink enough water. Another kid was an ABC, and she asked him why are your parents are so bad and didn’t teach you Chinese. When she got to me, she asked me if I like “my President Bush”. Pain and suffering all the way for this sour woman because I think she believed deep down in her heart that the only way to improve is to suffer, and that learning can’t be fun or you are just goofing off. Our class size decreased from 10 to 3 students in the next few weeks. Students changed classes, so I did the copy cat thing and changed. The new class was fantastic. I don’t regret the bad experience though, because learning about what some of the Taiwanese students go through on a daily basis is an eye opener. The education system is why many people value hard work over actual results. It explains why creativity over rote memorization needs to be taught. You still have to do the work and memorize vocabulary so you have something to work with. I know a word when I can hear it, and write the pinyin, the character, and can use it in a sentence.
The textbook is straightforward and fairly easy to use. It comes with an audio CD and you can purchase a character workbook along with the textbook. In fact, I plan to use it to continue study on my own time when I return to my home country.
The vocabulary is specifically aimed at improving daily proficiency in practical life situations (buying groceries, talking about the weather, travel, etc.). It takes a bit of rote memory at first, but as the chapters unfold, you learn more about the different meanings and usages of various frequently used words.
There are truly many opportunities to meet other foreign nationals from all walks of life. Mostly undergraduate students, but some mid-career and academic students as well.
The class is spent almost exclusively working through the textbook and teachers generally don’t prepare supplementary materials. The thing I found the most useful in class were conversations with the teacher when we would be able to experiment with different constructions and vocabulary, and learn a bit about Taiwanese culture. However, I did find that my teacher spent too much class time chatting in English, and annoyed a few students with her not politically-correct views on various subjects.
I would recommend NTNU for beginners, but over time, the pace becomes too slow. My class is finishing book 1, and because I am studying on my own time as well, already the class work is too basic for me.
Can’t say I agree with this; it’s not a high school, it’s a university, and taking the mandarin course here is entirely of one’s own volition.
I don’t think PAVC is that expensive either, certainly not compared to the several core texts I had to buy each semester for my bachelor’s degree. They’re easy to sell secondhand too.
Books are expensive? Aren’t they like NT500? I attended a few semesters at MTC thought the experience was just average. The staff there is a joke and I remember I tried to avoid them at all cost.
It really depends on your classmates. If the teacher is an ass or can’t teach, at least your classmates make the time enjoyable.
They are expensive because they are the same ones I used 20 years ago, and the same ones used 30 years ago, with the only difference that I used maybe 2 books for all the courses. Big, heavy, Quijote lenght and weight books. They just “conveniently” split each book into five pieces, charged more for each as if it was just The One, and did not even bother to add colors/more drawings/update vocabulary. They tell me they made revisions and added dialogues, I still have to find them/have someone point them out to me.
At least in my time -and from what I heard, has not changed much- most people just enroll there for the visa/scholarship, so you have classmates with BA or MA in Chinese/Asian Studies in the basic levels so they can have it easy and get good grades. Problem is they make it harder to ask the silly questions for real basic students who come here with just 2 words -Nihao and Xiexie. This is made worse by the fact -I point this out again- that the instructors here, all of them, have no training on how to teach someone from level 0 without translating into English. It is harder, so they just give up. As in any other Taiwanese school, they teach to the upper crust and leave the slow ones behind. Class can become then a nice dialogue among the fluent students… non fluent drop out. Then you have Overseas Chinese, speakers of Cantonese or other dialects that also have a leg up on everyone else. Koreans and Japanese who also have similar charaters. Hence the only way to survive and at least pass the courses so you won’t lose your money and visa is to join the Secret Society of Pass the Tests Used Before. Memorize and have a good grade so you can have more time to practice/really learn outside.
In my times racism was bad, because aside from looking down on us non Overseas Chinese or US students, the instructors looked down on Taiwanese people and discouraged openly from practicing outside. Moreover, class was a bubble. Teachers could not prepare materials based on everyday life because it was suposed that people outside of the classroom spoke bad Mandarin. Taiwan Guoyu was not good enough for them. So, what were we doing here then? What was the advantage of coming to Taiwan to learn in a classroom? To be able to repeat a recording in the lab is not communication. But then most translations here are not for communication purposes but rather to show off what you know… Sigh…
At least now they accept pinyin. In our times it was anatema.
This thread is an excellent summary of why to stay away from Shida MTC. Reading @mrho, @tango42, @milk.19 and @Icon’s posts feels like a description of my experiences exactly.
I wrote about it in other threads (wasn’t aware of this one), advising people to avoid Shida but I don’t think there’s anything else I could add here beyond additional examples of even more blatant racism, rudeness and incompetence I witnessed, however even without those, the general picture should be clear to everyone already. I’d then like to add my voice to say that (i) yes, it is indeed all true and (ii) there is no exaggeration in the stories above.
The only way MTC gets away with the substandard service it provides while charging an ever-increasing, premium price for it is because new incoming students do not have all the above information until it’s too late or cumbersome to make any changes.
Dear prospective Chinese learners coming to Taiwan: you’d do well to heed the above advice. If you choose to study anywhere else other than Shida MTC, your experience is unlikely to be worse, and at the very least it can save you quite some money.
I took NTNU MTC classes to learn Chinese, and I found the intensive courses had a much faster pace. The 3hrs of class are less time than you spend on homework. It’s also possible I had a good teacher and great classmates, which can make a difference. I also had a very “fun” class at normal pace where the effort level was lower. One teacher praised how well I drew characters - but she focused on characters way too much, and I transferred. Overall I found the teachers very good, with only 1-2 exceptions.
But if you go to NTNU MTC - get a language exchange partner! You’re missing a valuable benefit of the classes if you skip that, and it helps your conversational Chinese enormously. Unlike in class, you need to be talking and listening for minutes at a time - first time, expect to get tired easily. But the more you practice speaking with a language exchange partner, the longer you can keep up.
One caveat for me is that could afford the classes, so if someone is weighing cost / benefit in terms of time, I can’t speak to that.
One classmate said he transferred from NTU’s Chinese class to NTNU because the books and classes were more up to date, covering things like online shopping. Otherwise I’m not familiar with the other options.