From what I’ve seen of my students here, (adults) all they can think about is business. Making money seems to be the only thing they are interested in.
I have had a couple of students (out of the 200 or so I taught) who want to be in a rock band, or wanna be illustrators. But almost every other student cite their dream job as “boss” and are either in sales or are intersted in going into sales.
Weirdly, almost all the students have exactly the same hobbies (it’s kinda scary actually):
[color=#400000]what are your hobbies?[/color]
sleep, shopping, watch movies, surf the net
This is IT for 90% of my students. This is all they do with their lives. I have found a few students who play basketball but that’s about it. No surfers, no ping-pong players, no photographers.
Those hobbies reminded me of a study the New York Times reported on how many hours of every day adults spend looking at various screens. Out of a sampling of over three hundred subject over the course of nine hundred plus days, it was found that the average adult in the states spends about eight and a half of their waking hours in front of some sort of glowing rectangle.
Add ‘drinking’ to the list and you’d have all the hobbies of your average small town inhabitant in any western country. They might add reading or something to give a semblance of being interesting.
It’s the same if you ask the question ‘What did you do at the weekend?’ and the answer is ‘nothing’. This is pretty much true of everyone eveywhere, although with me chuck in ‘drinking’.
Also, don’t forget that they may simply lack the vocabulary to describe what they actually do. Brainstorm a bit of hobby vocab one lesson and see if that improves things. A lot of people here are actually a lot more interesting than westerners think.
Yeah, if you asked around the average person in the UK. You’d find that
a) They have the Friends boxset
b) All of Harry Potter on DVD and paperback
c) Bridget Jones’s frigging diary
d) Sex in the City (a-d would be found on a coffee table)
e)They probably went on holiday to Spain and enjoy going to 70’s night (The worst fucking abomination of an entertainment event)
They enjoy all the soaps.
Hobbies are all based around TV and what is easy to get because they don’t have to think.
Having said that, I have one student who collects ancient Chinese antiques, specializing in knives
Adult language students in Taiwan are of a certain demographic, too. There’s all into making money because they don’t have any because they are gullible enough to pay for us to ‘teach them English’. Everyone in Taiwan that I knew who spoke English taught themselves, learned at school, or learned through traveling, or fucking white guys.
[quote=“yamato”]From what I’ve seen of my students here, (adults) all they can think about is business. Making money seems to be the only thing they are interested in.
I have had a couple of students (out of the 200 or so I taught) who want to be in a rock band, or wanna be illustrators. But almost every other student cite their dream job as “boss” and are either in sales or are intersted in going into sales.
[/quote]
If you look at Taiwan the “haves” are the people that own companies, and the “have nots” are the ones working for them.
I don’t think when taiwanese go into pay negotiations they can use the: “if you pay me more, i ll stay here working at your company” angle. I’ve found that taiwanese management generally assume that if you have big plans to make lots of money you’ll leave and start your own company - probably in competition with their company, so there’s no point paying you lots of money to stay with them.
If you want to start a company it helps to know something about sales, so thats why that is important to them as part of starting their own company and being the boss.
Yes, I guess many of our wives could be described as having learned English that way. [/quote]
Hey, no judgement from me: not sure why the eyeroll smiley. I’m saying it works better than dicking about at Global Village.[/quote]
For someone who in an adjacent thread is very concerned about how I wives might feel about what is posted, reducing their efforts to learning English to, “fucking white guys”, it is a bit thoughtless, no? I might have thought you would have been perceptive enough to pick up on the baggage associated with statements like that.
As for the topic. My experience with language learning is that you need both. You need the classroom for the structure and the concepts and real-life interaction for the fluency and nuance. SOs can play a role. Have a good argument and see how many finer points of meaning you will pick-up.
[quote=“Elegua”]
For someone who in an adjacent thread is very concerned about how I wives might feel *about what is posted, reducing their efforts to learning English to, “fucking white guys”, it is a bit thoughtless, no? I might have thought you would have been perceptive enough to pick up on the baggage associated with statements like that.
As for the topic. My experience with language learning is that you need both. You need the classroom for the structure and the concepts and real-life interaction for the fluency and nuance. SOs can play a role. Have a good argument and see how many finer points of meaning you will pick-up.[/quote]
Sure, and they get the structure at school. I was referring to my friends, not your wives.
Honestly, I taught languages to adults for ten years, and am convinced the process is the least efficient way. Spending time , one on one, with someone who knows your language level well and cares enough to help you whenever you open your mouth is one of the best ways. If someone is convinced they reached an upper intermediate level through cramschool study as an adult in Taiwan, then they are utterly fooling themself because the level of input is not tuned enough and not enough in terms of quantity. Effort is irrelevant; the key factors are intelligence/aptitude for languages and exposure to huge amounts of input at the appropriate level. A lot of research and and my own observation have made this fairly clear to me.
Me, I learned Chinese at Shida and from my friends. I learned my other languages at school or taught myself. Shida was absolutely not enough. My Chinese is shite.
Taiwanese ladies, if you want to get on in English, get a ‘special friend’. Or, if you really can’t bring yourself to do something so … unp leasant … study by yourself. Take the oodles of cash you waste on being one of twenty in unqualified hangover boy’s credit crunch travel fantasy and spend it on books and movies and holidays.
This isn’t controversial advice; it’s akin to saying if you want to get fit, don’t join a gym, exercise.
Here, Buttercup! You’re talking shite! I got with my wife so I could get some tit and pussy action without having to buy her dinner first. She could ALREADY speak better English than me before I met her. And no, she hadn’t been fucking other white guys beforehand.
Now all I get is dirty nappies, baby rash ointment and why the fuck haven’t I washed the damn bottles yet?
[quote=“yamato”][color=#400000]what are your hobbies?[/color]
sleep, shopping, watch movies, surf the net[/quote]
That’s why we removed the “Hobbies and interests” section from our student biographical questionnaires. 95% of the time, they would write listening to music, watching TV, watching movies, reading comics, and other non-hobbies. Occasionally someone would mention some musical instrument, a form of dance that happens to be in vogue, a game (usually Go), or a sport (usually baseball or basketball).
If they want to tell us something interesting about themselves, there is now an “Other” section.
An interesting anecdote from the office: there was an essay requirement for a university application that one of our students had to answer. The first question was “Please tell us about your professional goals”. The student had no problem with this. The second question was “Please tell us something about your personal goals.” The student had no idea what this meant. I explained that it referred to goals that had nothing to do with work or school. Her expression went blank.
I said, “For example, some people might want to climb to the top of Mt. Everest.” After some more examples and explanations, she said, “OK, I think I understand.” But the next day she called the office to talk to one of our consultants, because she simply couldn’t grasp the concept of a “personal goal”.
In the end, the personal goal she chose was “life-long learning”, another clichéd Taiwanese goal usually placed under the “long-term professional goals” category by our students.
You might laugh at the Taiwanese with their goals of ‘life long learning’, but have a think about what that really means. It means travelling the world on daddy’s dime, farting about with increasingly useless Masters and PhDs. Now THAT is a lifestyle I could aspire to.
