I don’t know what exactly you’d have to give up to pursue your Chinese studies, the way you put it makes it sound quite serious. In my case it was definitely worth it, I’ve never regretted it. I enjoyed it and learned a lot, although, beyond the beginner level, I was mostly learning by myself, and at times felt the classes I attended were not conducive but disruptive to my progress, as they burdened me with time-consuming assignments of little educational value.
I could have made much better use of the scholarship money if I were allowed to hire a teacher privately. This is not an option however. Theoretically, you can register for one-on-one through Shida, but the rates are prohibitively high. It’d still be more efficient to enrol for any group class in the cheapest language center (Wenhua?), and then find a private teacher to supplement that.
Admittedly, at some point I started looking at Shida exactly the way ironlady just put it:
Or, in other words: “you can get some money from the government if you share some part of it back with the government. Even after this deduction, it’s still a net gain relative to self-financing, so why not.”
If you’re at an intermediate level already, just not familiar with the traditional characters, you would benefit a lot more if your teacher takes account of this, and works with you, perhaps individually, to cover the differences.
What might happen instead when you ask to join a non-beginner class at Shida is that you will have to take a placement test, on which you will do relatively badly, as you don’t know the traditional characters. You will then be placed in a group below your listening and speaking abilities, and find the class too easy and boring, although you might still struggle with the characters.
Don’t expect anyone at Shida to take into account your special circumstances, you are just an input to the system that needs to be processed in a uniform way. So, by all means, start learning the traditional characters now, through Pleco or otherwise.
You can definitely have a life outside of school if you navigate the system well. Register for your classes as early in the morning as possible. The first four days of each month, sit through 5 hours in the library, the soap opera, or any other large-group class (I think the limit is 5 hours per day). Then you can be free as early as 10 am everyday for the rest of the calendar month.
MTC enrolment does not grant you Shida student status. You can register to use some of the student facilities but for a different, much higher price than the local students. Shida facilities are not that great in the first place, for this in Taipei you should choose Taida or maybe Zhengda.
You asked what I would have done differently: I would have avoided Shida. At the time I thought it would be worth the premium and it would make a difference over any other language center in how much I would be able to learn. Nothing could be further from the truth: most of what I learned, I learned myself, and it mattered little which language center I chose. As for Shida, it used to be a comparatively good proposition maybe 20 or 30 years ago but ever since, the quality of instruction and the facilities have been getting worse and worse, while the tuition and other fees have been increasing steeply every year. Who can blame them though, if people just keep on coming anyway, due to their lack of information. Still, now it’s essentially an operation to extract maximum short-term profit for as long as possible, without reinvesting any of it or any making any tangible improvements. There are too many bad and mediocre teachers who should have been fired long time ago but never will because they’re too well-connected. Even the cleaners at Shida are hired through connections, so they don’t feel particularly compelled to clean either. And on top of it all there is an incompetent and rude office staff that has at times put students in serious trouble, for example with visa matters, through their mistakes or misinformation. They too, of course, have never been held accountable for anything.
Although in the end things have worked out decently for me anyway, if at the time of making the decision I knew what I know now, I would have chosen differently. There must be some other place that is better but even if there isn’t, then there is at least something cheaper. And if that cheaper place actually offers 3 hours of real instruction per day, as Shida used to, eliminating the need for forced library hours, or at least clean restrooms, that would be a nice touch.
