I’ve just finished a semester of Chinese language study at National Taiwan University’s Chinese Language Center. I’m posting my experience and thoughts about the course here, because I don’t have a blog focusing on Chinese language learning. If you’re thinking about coming to Taiwan to study Chinese, I hope this post helps you making some choices about where to study.

National Taiwan University is Taiwan’s #1 school. Since I’m already studying my PhD at NTU, I started classes at the CLD because it’s convenient for me. Even though the price is high – $35,000nt per course (I think a course is 180hours, so actually the price is not bad).

I’ve been in Taiwan a long time and can speak Chinese, but my writing is very bad. Since NTU uses only an old-fashioned paper-and-pencil test for placement, I did poorly. But then they booked me into the wrong time frame; there were no other openings at the same level and at the right time. At first they told me “sorry, but you can get %50 of your money back.” I pouted for awhile, and they said “or you can try this higher class and see if the teacher lets you in.”

I went with the 2nd option. Actually, the new class was book 3 of the Audio-Visual textbooks, and I already knew a lot of the vocabulary. When I started, the teacher asked “are you sure this class won’t be too easy for you?” The other classmates were also impressed with my speaking.

But my writing sucks, which became more and more apparent, as nearly everyday we spent a lot of time on writing worksheets, writing in the book and workbook, and taking tests. Eventually I stopped doing the work altogether, and started skipping the tests.

In my defense: 1) Writing Chinese Characters by hand is excruciating; I can type them on a computer and recognize them. Spending the time to write them out makes me feel like a caveman drawing pictures on the wall (which is basically what Chinese is). 2) I’m doing my PhD and also running a few small businesses. I want to improve my Chinese but practicing writing characters does not boost my vocabulary, grammar or speaking ability.

I’m a stubborn student and hard to teach. At the end of the course, I learned about half of the material. I had already paid for next semester, but this morning I went in to take another placement test. They have no extra classrooms, so I was in the student room surrounded by extremely annoying and loud people chatting. Then I moved into the hall, which is dimly lit. I gave up on the test because the environment was so frustrating, and I’ve got two conferences this weekend to prepare presentations for. When I gave in my test the tester looked like she’d been expecting me to fail; I surmise that my teacher had been complaining about what a poor student I was. They said I could redo book 3. I didn’t expect them to let me continue to book 4 (why should they?) but said book 3 would be boring. She strongly encouraged me to get a refund and find a new school, as did the office. So I agreed.

Anyway, I don’t blame them for wanting to get rid of me, I was a pain in the ass, and they handle students like me with being rigid in their curriculum and teaching methods. But oh, what a breath of fresh air to go on to the Chinese Culture University’s website and find an online placement test. (http://scedna.sce.pccu.edu.tw/MLCSite/ClassTest/ClassTestMain.aspx). Press play to listen, select the right multiple choice answer. Heaven.

It’s not just Chinese, I’ve never been fond of writing by hand, I have terrible handwriting. But I’m pretty freaking awesome at typing and using a computer. I also love online flashcards, tests, and Chinese language software. I love using Pleco on my iphone to instantly translate characters I don’t know. National Taiwan University CLD seems about a decade behind in language learning technology.

I want to learn Chinese effortlessly and quickly, and be able to use it to express myself immediately. I don’t want to waste a lot of time practicing skills I will never, ever use (like writing out characters by hand).

There were also other little things that annoyed me, like my teacher coming to class and eating her breakfast while making us do busy work, or spending almost 1/2 of all the class hours writing tests and paperwork (stuff that could be done at home independently – classrooms are for speaking, aren’t they?), never being able to operate the audiovisual technology without calling in someone to help turn on the projector, etc.

As an English teacher, I know a thing or two about learning languages – although Chinese is really a beast of a different color. I don’t think any native Chinese speaker, who spent thousands of hours as a child forced to memorize and copy Chinese characters (which, I’m convinced, is why all Chinese people need to wear glasses, having destroyed their eyesight at a young age) can possibly understand what it’s like to learn Chinese as a foreign language. (My teacher’s favorite expression was “this is easy, right? Easy!”)

If you are a serious student interested in traditional Chinese characters and are coming to Taiwan ONLY to learn Chinese, and you’re prepared to focus on handwriting Chinese, then NTU may be a good choice. But they also seem a little unorganized, cramped, with limited classrooms and other cool language learning tools, and I’m not sure that they warrant the price increase (other Chinese Language Centers such as the Chinese Culture University and the National Taiwan Normal University seem cheaper, and more with it). The teachers are probably standard; they all seem to have their own teaching style, and they use the same books you’d find anywhere else. The office was very nice and friendly, but also inflexible and disorganized (this is pretty common in Taiwan though).

At any rate I’m excited to explore some other options, when I get my 90% of my tuition funds back (they’re keeping 10%, which is policy… but that’s a nice little bonus for doing nothing).

Learning Chinese Online 

Ok crap… I wrote this 14 years ago. And I haven’t gotten better at Chinese in all that time, which is obviously nobody else’s fault. Recently I’ve been listening to youtubes and even made myself an online tool for Chinese Flashcards so I hope maybe that will help. I’m at that intermediate phase of understanding some but missing a lot of vocabulary.

Instead of mostly been focused on the craft of writing, and teaching people with my online writing courses. I’ve shifted from art to writing and while it can be slow, after 20 YA fantasy novels I’m starting to make enough money to write full time, which is pretty exciting.