I moving this month to Taiwan and want to spend 1-2 months volunteer at a temple in the mountains. I think this temple will take me: wife relative.
Would it be a good idea with my few words and sentences knowledge of mandarin go to temple with probably no english speaking people.
The idea is to submerge my-self into chinese speaking environment, sort of to trow person who don’t know how to swim into water and human surviving instinct quickly teach how to swim, I know swimming idea is debatable but what about language?
Will it do me any good? Sort of boot-camp?
Or it will be useless?
for me it was a bit terrifying…I took a course for 8 months in Kaohsiung, and I thought that going there knowing nothing and everyone talking in Chinese would make me learn faster. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Without any basis in Chinese, it will be a very difficult uphill climb, since you have no point of reference.
It will be useless since you won’t be able to communicate at all. Someone may very well speak enough English. And it’s likely that the resident nuns or monks will be older and therefore Taiwanese not Mandarin speakers. Sorry to discourage you but you should really just go take some classes. Very, very few adult foreigners learn Mandarin by immersion. The one person I ever met who had (by spending 3 years in village in Sichuan in the late 1980s!) spoke about 10 other languages including Tibetan and Russian.
Have you already learned languages (other than your native one) through the sink-or-swim approach? If so, maybe you have a talent for languages and you could through some miracle get by.
But … even if the whole immersion-without-any-guidance approach were any good – and I think you’d do much better with something more traditional, certainly in the early stages – you do know, don’t you, that temples in the mountains (as opposed to, say, Longshan Temple in Taipei) tend to be quiet places? Not a lot of talking going on. And even if there were, one wonders just how useful the vocabulary you might pick up would be for life outside the temple.
I suppose there’s the possibility, too, that people there wouldn’t speak primarily Mandarin and you’d end up with Taiwanese and maybe some Hakka.
Basically: If you want to volunteer at a temple in the mountains because you want to be at a temple in the mountains, then go ahead. But as far as language-learning plans go,
Yes I have experience in immersion learning.
My native language is russian and I learn english this way when I came to US,… of course it was much longer period. But each time I visited Taiwan (5 times) before, even 1-2 weeks and trying to communicate with parents in law and just on the street, suddenly at the end of my stay I discovered that I picked up few words and sentences.
But nonetheless I appreciate your advices.
[quote="cranky laowai"]Have you already learned languages (other than your native one) through the sink-or-swim approach? If so, maybe you have a talent for languages and you could through some miracle get by.
But … even if the whole immersion-without-any-guidance approach were any good – and I think you’d do much better with something more traditional programs, certainly in the early stages – you do know, don’t you, that temples in the mountains (as opposed to, say, Longshan Temple in Taipei) tend to be quiet places? Not a lot of talking going on. And even if there were, one wonders just how useful the vocabulary you might pick up would be for life outside the temple.
I suppose there’s the possibility, too, that people there wouldn’t speak primarily Mandarin and you’d end up with Taiwanese and maybe some Hakka.
Basically: If you want to volunteer at a temple in the mountains because you want to be at a temple in the mountains, then go ahead. But as far as language-learning plans go, [/quote]
I don’t think immersion is the most efficient way to learn a language, personally – especially not at or near the beginning. You can’t pick up what you can’t remotely understand, after all. And it’s overwhelming and frustrating. Whether or not you learned anything at all would depend greatly on whether some patient, kind soul at the temple was willing to lead you around pointing at objects or miming actions while teaching you simple words. There’s no guarantee there would be such a person. And what if the temple residents have taken vows of silence?
I would recommend taking classes (or intensive self-study) for 6-36 months before you consider doing immersion, and the above warning about Taiwanese vs. Mandarin is a good one. I did intensive self study for a year or so and then moved to Taiwan and moved in with a family who spoke no English for 5.5 years–that was real immersion. It was still verydifficult, but very fruitful. However, had I not had that initial period of study it would have been terribly frustrating, and even with that initial study I don’t think this approach would be best for many other people; people have different learning styles and different levels of tolerance for frustration.
I thought of doing the same thing once but after some clear thinking and research I decided that learning through classes or self-study for at least a year (or more) would be much better.
Just to add to the consensus I think you will be more prone to failure and frustration this way. Also, while staying in a temple might be a great learning experience for other reasons I don’t think it’s the best place to try language immersion.
Also, if you are only going to stay to 1-2 months that is not near enough time to really learn anything.
I take it your wife is Chinese, that should be immersion enough, I think the 80% of result from 20% of work principle applies here. There are really a lot of variables at work in “a temple in the mountains” for another thing!
When I came to Taiwan I knew no Chinese aprt from ni hao and xiexie, from the Lonely Planet guide. I spent the first six months here in Cishan (a village up in the mountains in Kaohsuing county), and besides that and only watching local Chinese language programs I learned absolutely nothing.
I only started learning after I moved to Tainan city and started self-study from the Practical Audio visual series of books. If you do decide to go that route, I advise you at least take along a similar book fro self study to help you along…
Thank you.
We probably will have interview with our monk relative anyway, will see what he would say and how and if he can help to encourage people at the temple to help me to learn chinese in month period of the time.
If you are the only foreigner, and everyone else speaks Mandarin and you spend a lot of time with them, you MAY end up with pretty good listening comprehension. But it would be better to take classes first in Taipei for a few months, and then go. That way you’ll have a basis and will progress faster.
My own experience: I spent a year in a little village in Sichuan. My spoken Mandarin didn’t improve much, but my listening comprehension by the end was better than it was after five years in Taipei. In Sichuan I was the only foreigner, and I spent hours a day surrounded by people who were speaking Chinese, often about me. In Taipei, I studied Chinese, but most of my time was with English-speakers.
I’ve been partly immersed in another situation. I’ve spent a few months surrounded by Igbo speakers. I started off knowing no Igbo, and I didn’t study it, but for hours every day I’d be in the room while Igbo speakers chatted, and after a while I could sometimes understand what they were saying. Still, taking a class first or at the same time would have been better.
Well I could share my experience with you, since my situation is pretty much the same as yours. I have been living in a monastery in the mountains for the last six months, and that was one of my biggest reasons for coming here (immersing myself in a Chinese speaking community which would make me learn the language faster), along with learning more about Buddhism. The place where we differ though is that I studied Chinese for almost 1 year full-time in a language center in Taiwan before coming here, so that I was already up to a conversational level, and I could understand much of what was being said around me. Even though I would say my Chinese has improved in this time, it has been slower than when I was studying in school, which is why I am planning to move back to the city in the summer do to another year of formal language study.
In your case, coming with a very limited amount of Chinese, and only staying for one or two months, you would probably make little progress, especially in your speaking. Most of what they say would just fly right over your head. Of course if you can get a monk who has some free time to give you one-on-one classes that would definitely help, although you would want to bring a textbook to use in class.
So I would suggest that you go visit the temple, but not with learning Chinese as your main priority. It’s a great opportunity to learn more about Buddhism and Chinese/Taiwanese culture, if you have an interest in those things.
