Lol, that’s hilarious. My job, and you don’t actually know what it is, wouldn’t exist if you were right 
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I was addressing a hypothetical foreign English teacher. Agree that was not clear.
And for the record, I have known many excellent and dedicated foreign English teachers in Taiwan who I think are contributing a great deal to Taiwan. I just think that there are plenty of Taiwanese who could be doing their jobs.
The few Taiwanese whose English is actually good enough to be a teacher won’t bother as the pay has been stagnant and shit for a decade now. Or they have other lucrative careers for their abilities. Imagine paying $500 an hour now for someone living in Taipei, that’s not even survival wages.
As for the average person’s English ability, try calling the phone company or bank and press 9 for English and see how good it is lol
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As far as I can tell, the pay has been stagnant for 35 years. There are many people wih excellent English who would do the job but are foolishly excluded because they lack the right degrees.
I don’t think that’s a good indicator. If you actually go a branch, there will almost always be someone who speaks English well enough to assist you. Even some of my neighborhood 7-11 clerks speak English fairly well and can help foreign customers. All of them? Of course not.
Not in the buxibans, they’re hiring international and local students with no degrees. The primary qualifications are how little pay will they accept and how much shit they will eat
Not for my bank or phone companies in Kaohsiung. The occasional 711 clerk or Subway employee surprises me with initiating and sustaining English for an entire encounter, but 90% of my interactions are in Chinese. Mostly, that’s fine. This is the Republic of China, I speak Chinese well enough for most things. But the bank and phone companies are an issue every time I need to deal with something new. I’m pretty sure the bank people lie to me rather than try to deal with it
The apps for these two companies are pretty awful, too.
As long as the main trade partner is China, and the economy is based on low cost manufacturing, it doesn’t matter. And hey, what can go wrong?
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And the “teachers” running EMI classes are overwhelmingly Fulbright ETAs on their second year of teaching ever.
That’s the requirements of
- A US passport
- A BA in anything
- One year of experience being the fun babysitter at a random public elementary school somewhere in Taiwan
- A high enough level of incompetence as to believe that 50k/month for a full time (20+ classes/week) teaching job is a good deal in 2025.
Absolutely nobody knows what they’re doing in their first few years as a teacher. But Fulbright has managed to convince the government that the most qualified people to teach EMI are a revolving door of people with zero experience teaching at all. And I want to know where the rest of that money is going cuz Fulbright ain’t paying their trainers (who need at least a masters degree) all that much more.
Yeah, they can’t figure it out
lol!
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Exactly….you just….think.
Well think about what would prefer as a Chinese language teacher if you were going to do business in China: would you pick Pedro from Nicaragua with a degree in Chinese or Xin Ju from Shanghai with a lifetime in China?
Be honest now
There’s a reason why Native English Teachers get paid a hellova lot more than the taiwan teacher and I know you’ll say it’s racism- but it’s in fact the market.
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I forgot to mention that I believe the reason Taiwanese have better overall English skills is due to much higher average education levels here and also higher incomes and working holiday visa access so foreign travel and work experience has become more prevalent . Not necessarily any particular English scheme or related to X numbers of teachers from Y.
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Overall, the students I’ve met from SEA have much more comprehensible English than Taiwanese students. By that I mean, I can carry out a conversation with SEA students with relative ease, about a variety of topics, while Taiwanese students will get stuck because I used a different verb than the one they learned is supposed to go in that sentence pattern. Taiwanese students focus on very careful enunciation of words (while often getting them wrong) while SEA students will just say things to make themselves understood. In the long run, this works out better for SEA students, as they’re much more receptive to improvement.
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Yes that is because they have self selected to come to Taiwan. You are meeting just a small more educated subset of those countries.
Of course those countries cultures can be more outgoing in general especially Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia and to a lesser extent Vietnam and Thailand. But if you met Taiwanese in 3rd countries they’d also be speaking English right.
If you travel around Thailand you will encounter times when young staff in local hotels and restaurants have no English whatsoever. Basically…zero. Which doesn’t really happen in Taiwan because 99.9% of the youth population finished junior high school at least.
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You just found that Taiwan’s official calendar uses ROC years. You do not know that Nanjing is/was the ROC’s official capital.
I have decades of experience in Taiwan and what I ‘think’ about about there being plenty of Taiwanese with excellent English is based on wide empirical experience.
It is true that many naive students think that teachers from the target language country are best. But it is also true that non-native speakers who have learned a language well may have special insights on teaching that language based on their experience of learning it. Deicisions like this are one reason that education is an area where we might decide not to let the market decide everything.
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This is so frustrating. You’re not reading the posts. Either that or I’m doing a poor job making it clear.
Yes I admit to being flawed and to learning things regularly.
1/ nanjing was the official capital but it got moved and it was during a warring period between factions. Ultimately in this contemporary setting the government that controls Beijing. The ROCs capital was once Beijing and now it’s Taipei.
Here’s a question: in the 20th century why did the ROC move the capital from Nanjing to Beijing? Why is the capital Taipei now?
2/ to your point about Taiwanese I don’t care if you’ve got centuries of experience. The market forces dictate that native speakers are more valuable and the reasons were made clear.
So we’re back to the Beiyang era!
Guy
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Way back in the day when I worked in a “kindergarten”, many of the kids were very conversational after the first year or two (about 2.5 hours a day), and very conversational by the time they graduated at age 6 or 7. I taught older kids in the afternoons, and you could tell the ones who had come through the kindergarten program. I understand that it is nkw not legal to teach English in a full or half day program to littke kids, but that seems to be the age when the have have the time and development stage to soak it up.
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Ignorance deserves to be ignored you know what I mean.
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We’ve never left it. That’s my point. China is still in a civil war.
The problem now is that the taiwanese are being brainwashed that they are simply Taiwanese
Not so.
They are the Free Chinese and eventually they must reclaim what is theirs: China itself.
The CCP are working hard to convince the world that CCP = Chinese. It does not. The Free Chinese of Taiwan are still fighting for their survival and hopefully they’ll prevail.
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My passionate fans hard at work 
I figured they’d pounce at that post of mine