Will teaching English give me enough free time to study Chinese?

Hello,
I’ve been studying Chinese in Taiwan for a year now at a university language center and hope to find a job so as to keep improving my skills through self study or failing that, picking up classes again. I want to speak perfect Chinese a year from now.

I’ve applied to the big chain schools and I’m checking out smaller buxibans, but reading through the posts here I’m getting a bit anxious just because of how mixed opinions appear to be.

Should I expect to be doing comfortable 25 hour weeks with plenty of time to work on my language skills? Or 12 hour days making my goals totally unachievable? Is there some secret question that I can ask hiring managers to get an idea of what to expect?

If I can juggle teaching English, learning Chinese, AND raising a newborn baby, then you can comfortably manage 2 out of 3.

Depends on how many hours and if they expect you to do unpaid hours after and before. I know some teachers who work 25 hour weeks but add up close to 35-40 with unpaid hours of grading and stuff.

I would be far more concerned about your expectation that you will speak perfect Chinese in a year than about having a little free time to study.

@IronLady: I have just finished learning for a year. I think my skills are pretty good already so I think another year will suffice.

@andrew: How can I tell which places will force lots of unpaid hours on me? Is this just limited to big chain schools?

@DrewC: That’s good to hear. I hope I am as lucky as you are.

It’s not about being lucky. It’s just about having a strong work ethic. Don’t worry about whether you can do something. Just do it.

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Be sure and let me know how one can make one’s Chinese perfect in two years. Clearly I’ve wasted nearly 30 so far. LOL

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got to tag correctly, usually big chain makes you do lots of unpaid hours. But the best way to know is to ask. Will I have to work unpaid hours? Of course preparing for the class is unavoidable, but that’s expected. However some make you stay and do lots of paper work stuff.

Big chains expect a lot of unpaid hours so initially the answer is no. However with experience those hours can be drastically reduced. It really depends on whether your manager is chill or not. The petty ones like to create unpaid tasks and can be a pain to deal with.

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Pefect Chinese is impossible in just 2 years but you could become very good at speaking Chinese in that time frame. If you speak a lot with natives and study vocab regularly, it can be done. I mean, you can reach pretty good spoken Chinese in just 3 months if you dedicate time to it and speak with natives often.

English teaching is a perfect job to do if your priority is to study Chinese. Doing the basic 20 to 25 hours of class time, it won’t be a problem at all (although, if you’re not experienced, you’ll need to factor in a considerable amount of lesson planning time on top of that for the first few weeks, which will gradually lessen over the course of a few months). Even if you work plenty of overtime, English teaching at cram schools tends to be in afternoons and evenings, so if you’re willing to wake up early to give yourself time to study, you shouldn’t have any problems.

During my year of English teaching, I worked lots of overtime for a school where I basically had a contractual obligation to teach whatever classes they threw my way. But nearly all of my classes were in afternoons and evenings. I could have easily spent my mornings studying Chinese but, as I was young and foolish, I did the typical English teacher thing of staying out late every night and sleeping until the afternoon. Getting good at Chinese while teaching overtime hours is definitely doable.