I’m wondering if it’s at all common or possible for a Mandarin-speaking foreigner to rent a room with a local family in Taibei? I’d like to have a more immersive experience instead of living with a bunch of other foreigners speaking English all the time. Is this doable? Possible?
My high school Chinese teacher recommended this. She lived in Taiwan for 8 or so years in the 80s and at the time she said she often saw listings in various places for this kind of thing…don’t know if that still happens?
Very ususual nowadays, mainly because people work/children study until 10pm and there is no one home but Granny and teh dog. I had an acquaintance who tried that. His Taiwanese was excellent -from Grandma- but his Mandarin and reading skills was just like the rest.
Learning Chinese can be a bit stressful. Having fellow learners actually helsp, doe snot hinder. You will have plenty of input outside, from people, media, etc. The classroom is a bubble by itself and you wil notice teh book has little to do with outside life. What you need is good language exchange, not unlimited nonsense input. You need input to your level. That is why studying with a gf/bf is more productive -really, seriously. You need communication with a purpose in a friendly environment. A harried family might not be the place.
[quote=“Jialin”]I’m wondering if it’s at all common or possible for a Mandarin-speaking foreigner to rent a room with a local family in Taibei? I’d like to have a more immersive experience instead of living with a bunch of other foreigners speaking English all the time. Is this doable? Possible?
My high school Chinese teacher recommended this. She lived in Taiwan for 8 or so years in the 80s and at the time she said she often saw listings in various places for this kind of thing…don’t know if that still happens?
Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.[/quote]
I did this for a few months as a student here, and did not enjoy it. I think a lot of it comes down to whether you enjoy family life in the first place, and your luck in finding a family that you mesh with. In my case, I was in my early twenties and was more interested in socializing with my peers than hanging with a family, so it felt constricting (they would comment on my comings and goings, hours kept, didn’t like me bringing people over, and so forth). So it was a bad choice on my part in the first place. I was much happier after moving out and finding a room in a shared apartment (a mixed group of local and foreign folks my age). I think different things work for different people at different stages of life. I enjoyed having roommates then, but would have a lot of trouble sharing an apartment with roommates today in middle age. Also, if your purpose is having an immersive experience, make sure that the family you move in with does not speak and is not interested in learning English (which would be a fairly rare family here), or you may just end up being a free language exchange partner.
I lived with a couple of families, and it didn’t work. I got almost no ‘immersion’ - either they didn’t talk to me, or they were rarely home, or they just wanted to practice English. The other problem is that in one place the parents treated me like their daughter - so didn’t want me to go out at night and kept tabs on what I was doing, or tried to. They even phoned my boss to tell him that I was not to go out in the evening.
Normally, we advise newbies not to rent places where you have to live with the landlord/landlady. In the best of cases, you have situations like the one Bababa explains, in the worse…