Ok world, I just wanted to throw out there my first experience at TMC, which I mentioned/asked about up thread and decided to sign up for one month of classes at.
My level: ACTFL advanced-high and probably still there since I last tested to that level years ago
Location: near shida. At most five min walk from various bus stops/the MRT.
The classroom: if I hadn’t lived in Taiwan as long as I have, i wouldn’t have entered the building. The classroom is on the fifth floor in a mixed use building that is circular and open to the outside in the center. (and has no windows. I question the fire department inspection standards. The whole construction of the classroom space is ??? to me. Even the door from the outside on the fifth floor was made of plywood on small hinges). There were a bunch of what could be individual desks shoved together to form a giant table in the middle. We used a large computer monitor to view the textbook (and also had to buy the textbook ourselves). The teacher used a Wacom tablet to write characters. Or he typed them into a slide. This worked for the space because there were only three students including me. I wouldn’t say anything is too out of the ordinary about any of this for Taiwan, but I do want to make sure the sketchy building set up is known to anyone thinking of coming from abroad to study Chinese.
The class itself was great. We discussed the topic within the textbook rather than analyzing grammar or being tested on vocab. This was excellent for me because I could not care less about cramming either of those things. I worried a little that I was paying to just talk and no one would actually help me acquire new words or suggest better/more precise ways to say things. In that case, just hanging out with Chinese-speaking friends here would have been equally sufficient. But the teacher was pretty good about pointing out tones and helping to introduce new vocab related to the text (but not in the text itself). If I’m really going to hunker down and improve my Chinese, I probably need someone to submit essays to and go over those essays with them each week, but that’s not the fault of this school. A conversation class where my use of language is being directed towards better accuracy/precision is great. As long as I continue to listen to and read the text before class to prepare to discuss the topic, this way of learning will work for me.
當代中文 level 5 has some seriously politically charged / relevant to being able to talk about current events lessons. There are three reading segments in each lesson, along with a decent amount of questions and conversation topics. Some of the topics for discussion are stupid, but there’s enough content in the book that those topics can be skipped over. This level is on the easy side for me when it comes to the text itself, but the topics are certainly topics that i dont have a lot of vocabulary for, so class itself isn’t boring/below my level. My classmates and I are all at about the same conversational level, which is definitely something I worried about not happening given the stories on this site. I get that it’s hard to place people, but this one worked pretty well for me.
My biggest complaint is the teacher providing words to us while our brain is doing the perfectly normal act of recalling a word slightly more slowly than a native speaker would. It’s not interruption level, but when you’re learning an L2, you need time to think about what you’re saying and I think the teacher was a little overzealous on not allowing that time. But this is something that I will bring up with the teacher (in private, after class) if it starts to actually annoy me.
I’ve only had one class so far, but I would say that the experience in the class itself was good. Ill post further updates if they become assholes about money or my teacher starts to criticize me for how I dress or the opinions I shared about the topic in the class or any of the other problems people have outlined about mandarin classes at shida, et al.