Sunday, May 29, 2011

Why Chinese is better than English

So I have already gotten through my gripe about English grammar, superfluous s's and changing forms of verb. Countless irregular verbs, then there are the irregular plurals. Like one man, two men, one person, two people. After that there is the problem that English has far to many synonmns (words that mean practically the same thing as other words) example: damp, moist, wet, clammy, soggy, soaked, drenched etc. Then there are a lot of variations on basic words depending on if they are used as a noun adjective or verb. Happy- Happyness- Happily Electric-Electrical-Electricity. Apart from the add -ly rule for adverbs there isn't a consistent way to change a word you already know into a verb-adjective or noun.

Chinese has none of these problems if you want to turn a verb into the past tense you add 了 le on the end. You want to talk about lived experience like have done just add 過 guo. Want to turn a statement into a question just add 嗎 ma on the end the spoken question mark. Everything is just a lot more simple.

Then there is my favourite part of Chinese. The way they make words is really simple. They never reach back to an ancient language to make something new. They just put together two characters they already have. For example days of the week 星期一  星期二 星期三 nothing more than week 1, week 2, week 3. Same as months of the year 一月 二月 三月 one month, two month, three month.

How drab and uncreative you say but wait how does one say earth? well you take the word for ground 地 di and the word for ball 球 qiu and you make ground ball or earth -diqiu. Same as computer you take electric 電 (dian) and the word for brain 腦 (nao)    to make electric brain  電腦 or computer. Telephone is 電話(dianhua) or electric talk. Mobile phone is 手機 (shouji) hand machine and a plane is 飛機 (feiji) flying machine. A train is a 火車 (huoche) fire vehicle and a bicycle is a 腳踏車 (jiaotache) foot powered vehicle.  Furniture is 家具 (jiaju) house tool, toys are 玩具 (wanju) play tools, work tools are工具 (gongju) work tools, cutlery is 餐具 (canju) meal tools, kitchenware is  廚具 (chuju) Kitchen tools. Sausages are 香腸 (xiangchang) fragrant intestines. Now to animals; dinosaurs are 恐龍 (konglong) terrible dragons. A giraffe is a 長頸鹿 (changjinglu) long neck deer and a panda is a 熊貓 (xiongmao) bear cat. The list goes on here but you get the idea.

The point is if you learn a long complex word you can break it down and you have just learned several new smaller words. Or if you learn a new long word and it is comprised of smaller words you already know,that word is from there in is incredibly easy to remember. You just think of the translation and the word acts as its own mneumonic (memory device).

So Chinese is hard but it isn't ridiculous. It's flaws are evened out by a heafty set of advantages. I honestly think from a teaching point of view Chinese is far simpler. So don't worry once you get over the hump Chinese has a lot going for it as a language. For anyone considering learning it as a language go for it or as they say around here 加油 jiayou! (add oil/ petrol).

English is shit once you try teaching it (English sucks pt. 2)


Now I thought Chinese was the worlds hardest language? What do you mean it's better than English? Well Chinese has a lot of things that are very difficult about it, characters and tones being the major ones for us whiteys. But once you get beyond them it has quite a lot of advantages the ways in which the grammar is structured and the way they create words are refreshingly simple.

Of course as native speakers we think English is simple. But we have been exposed to it for a long long time. All the rules, exceptions to rules and inconsistencies contained there within are completely natural to us. But to second language speakers English is very difficult. Firstly there is the ridiculous irregular verbs system where to change the tense requires you to learn extra words. E.g. go, went, gone. fly, flew, flown. speak, spoke, spoken.

Secondly although English is a 'phonetic' language, it is not by any means consistently so. Contrast the sound 'ough' makes in the following words: thought, drought, though, trough, rough, through, dough, enough, cough etc. If you try to teach any letter to sound rule you always come up with numerous exceptions.

Thirdly in terms of vocabulary English has a whole lot of extra words you need to learn. Because the word changes based on whether it is used as a noun, verb, adjective or adverb. For example happiness, happy, happily. Anger, Angry, Angrily. Sometimes -ness can be added to a word to denote a noun but not consistently. Consider I am weak this is my weakness. Yet I am strong this is my strength. There are numerous examples of this but they are natural to us so to find examples is actually quite difficult.

Anyway consistent and simple rules are great for the language learner. It feels like once you have mastered a rule a large part of the language is now under your command and conquered. Yet in English you can learn a rule then learn all the ways in which you can't use the rule. So everytime you learn a rule you don't really feel like you get much in turn.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Chinese vs English

Before I came here I had heard reports that Chinese was the worlds hardest language. Is there any truth to this statement? A bit but then not really. Let me explain.

Unlike English and many other European languages that have letters and a one to one (roughly) sound to letter ratio. Chinese has these annoying things called characters. Each character represents one syllable of sound. Sometimes this is a word in and of itself. Sometimes it is part of a multisyllabic and multi character word. Although there are 1,000s and 1,000s of these things there is somewhat of an ordering system behind them. They have these things called radicals which occur in every character. Sometimes they are extremely logical and denote a group of words to which the character belongs. E.g. the water radical shui 水 can be found in many similar words such as bing 冰 (ice) he 河 (river) hai 海 (ocean) liu流 (to flow) ke 渴 (thirsty) etcc. Similarly the the radical yan 言 which means language can be found in shuo 說 (to speak) jiang 講 (to talk) yu 語 (language) and many others which I can't think of at the moment. Although these are some of the best examples and some don't really seem to follow much logic. They also have these things that are occassionally in characters called phonetics which means that often two characters with the same phonetic will either sound the same, have the same pronunciation but different tones or sometimes losely rhyme.

So this system is rather difficult to learn and you have no dependable way to determine what a character means by looking at its radical and phonetic (its even difficult to determine which is which) nor can you guess how to write by knowing a characters meaning and it's pronunciation. So it is quite hard to become literate as you have to remember what the pronunciation is for so many of these damn things. You will often know how to say a character but come across one in a text that you have studied before but have now completely forgotten how to say. Once you get off the ground I'm assured it isn't really that hard. We rarely as adults read words by pronouncing all the letters it would take forever. We learn to recognise shapes and predict what will come next by context. So it is to in Chinese that when you have been studying for long enough it no longer matters that they lack an alphabet as readers of that level aren't decoding text that way anyway.

But for learners its a bitch. Don't even get me started on learning to write as that is even more arduous a complete case of repetition and hours of pratice. So becoming literate in Chinese apart from learning to speak it is mostly what gives it its reputation as one of the worlds hardest languages. From a literacy standpoint I'm sure it is.

Now to speaking. The next difficult thing about Chinese for a non native speaker and for most of the world is it has these annoying things called tones. Now tones are applied to every word and there are four of them. The first is said high and light. The seconds rises like we say a question. The third starts low goes downward then briefly dips up and the fourth drops straight into the ground. The problem is we as speakers in English change our intonation all the time but it doesn't change the meaning of a word. Its usually used to express feeling or emotion or for emphasis. So many of these single syllable words can mean any number of things depending on your tone. As can a few double syllable words. Now if you take away the tones Chinese isn't a very phonectically rich lamguage. I can't remember where I read this but if you take away tones Chinese has a total of 400 different ways to say a syllable. This sounds like quite a lot but English apparently has 4,000 Even if you count tones I'm sure that means Chinese has a grand total of 1,600 sounds per syllable.

So the first problem is we can't really hear tones when we first start. If we can hear the difference we need to be really concentrating it isn't something we can notice in the middle of a conversation whilst trying to put together meaning. So when you first start out all the words you learnt sound like a lot of words you hear in conversation the only problem is they don't make any sense in the place. So you won't be able to pick up everything but you can take a guess and say 'I think I heard horse in there' they must be talking about horses. Well no you see 馬 ma3 is third tone they were talking about their mother 媽 ma1 or asking a question 嗎 ma or talking about scolding someone 罵 ma4. So when you first learn guessing for the jist of a conversation based on what you think you know is hard. It's easier when you get better as not only do you pick up the tones but you learn enough words and grammar to understand when each word could possibly be each word and when it couldn't be because it doesn't make sense. There are rarely cross overs where similar sounding words could be either one because of the surrounding words. The same way we can tell the difference between where and wear in conversation. I wear a shirt vs where is he? You understand by the sentence and surrounding words.

Seccondly the major problems with tones is pronunciation. We can't hit the tones properly. First tone and fourth tone are relatively straight forward. But second and third tone can be quite difficult for us to tell apart. We think we are saying second but really it is third. Even once you have learned to say all the tones accurately on command it still is quite difficult for your untrained voice box to bounce up and down and around trying to get a sentence out at normal speed. What's more tones are always the first aspect of pronunciation we forget. So a word I haven't said in a while I will remember the other aspects of its pronunciation but will always quickly forget the tones.

So how important are tones? Quite important. If you walk up to someone and say 'hello my name is....' they will probably be able to guess what you are saying by the context just like a foreigner who says to you 'hurro me nim ish....' The words alone aren't enough to guess but in a sentence you understand. However when you get the tones for something more complicated that the listener wasn't expecting you to say wrong they will look at you with a blank face 90% of the time completely unable to understand what you are trying to say. Try a few different combinations of tone and they will suddenly recognise what you are trying to say.

So pronunciation is hard and reading and writing kind of suck balls. Can we label it worlds hardest language yet?

Not so fast. Some things are refreshingly easy about Chinese that only become aparent when you try teaching the rules of English on the side. Chinese grammar although very different to our own is quite simple.

Which gets me to my second point: ENGLISH GRAMMAR IS SHIT
In English for example we say I am, he/ she/ it is, we/you/ they are. These three words are three different expressions of the same meaning 'to be.' This is something that requires hours and hours of drilling into the kids heads when they start learning. There is no rational reason why would should have three words when one will suffice just nicely. Also is the present simple tense (talking about things that happen regularly or all the time) we say I/ we/ you/ they do but he/ she / it does. Extra s's for no real reason that don't need to be there. But when we ask a question or say a negative we say 'Does he do?' and 'he doesn't do' so the s comes off the main verb and on to the 'helping verb.' Of course this is natural to us native speakers who have been speaking the language forever but for kids it requires hours and hours of drilling to get correct.

Then there is the world of verbs. Regular verbs are fine. To change a regular verb into the past simple tense or present perfect you just add -ed. Nice and simple. For example I jump. I jumped yesterday. I have jumped. But then they have these things called irregular verbs which requires you to learn two new verbs and two new spellings most of the time. The problem is its for almost all of the most commonly used verbs. You see for children even in English it is intuitive to say I go. I 'goed' yesterday. Simple copying of a pattern. But you aren't allowed you see, 'goed' isn't a word. We say 'I went yesterday' and 'I have gone.'

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

learning the zhongwen...

So a little before arriving here I decided to start studying Chinese. A while after I got out of high school I thought to myself 'I'm a smart guy, I love to travel I should really be able to speak two languages... or at least 1.5'

So before I got here I bought myself more textbooks than I could possibly need and listened to a lot of chinesepod tracks on my ipod while I worked in my bullshit factory job. It's now been about 9 months. First thing is first I was told the best way to truly learn a language is to go to a country that speaks it and live. You have it constantly around you, you are forced to use it to survive and before you know it you are yammering away like a local...sort of.

Although I imagine I am getting more input and practice opportunities than the person studying Chinese at University I wouldn't say I am by any means immersed. First of all for my job I am required when I am there not unsuprisingly to speak English. They have some what of a ban on speaking Chinese to the kids as they believe it is harmful to their English, they won't force themselves to express themselves in English if they know teacher speaks Chinese. Although I frequently break this rule as it provides a shortcut to check that the students actually understand what I am talking about. So for a large chunk of the day I speak mostly English.

As far as needing Chinese to survive that is true to an extent but my trips down to the shop to buy food, buying train tickets and ordering at restaurants don't constitute a wide range of vocabulary. At the shops I can say 'No bag thankyou, I don't have a membership card and how much is that?' Apart from occassionally needing to ask 'where something is' assuming I have the vocabulary to ask for it, it isn't a wide range of language. Same as going into a restaurant to order food besides 'I want ......' and 'how much is it' you don't really need a lot of Chinese. Of course there is learning food items but the thing about Chinese is if you haven't been taught it before you won't know what the characters say so more often than not you just ask for the same old. So you will get reinforcement for the basics but beyond that all the more rarely used vocab barely gets a chance to come up.

Same as for social situations most of us here end up making a circle of friends who are also teachers and staying in like kind. So socially we don't practice much Chinese either. On the chance that you do make a local friend many of them will want to actively search you out as a friend because you are a great opportunity to study all of that English they have been learning since high school. Not only will they be really keen to speak English with you but it's usually the easiest option as they have been studying it for a lot longer than you have Chinese.

Another thing with phonetic languages is walking out and around you will see a lot of writing. Once you roughly know what sounds the letters make you can constantly learn new words and phrases by realising what the place is or does, what an advertisment is selling then just make the connection to the English. Not so with Chinese if someone doesn't tell you how to say a character you can't reliably guess.

So how is the Chinese coming along? Slowly slowly When I look at other people in the same situation as me I realise I am doing fairly well but even in a full immersion environment few people are going to be fluent in under a year. A language has thousands and thousands of words just because there are litterally millions of things around us in the world worth describing. There is nothing intrinsically hard about learning that this word means this action/ object/ quality but there are so many words to learn to become a fluent speaker that it is hard to get them all in there. You learn new words then learn some more then realise you already forgot half of the original words you 'learned'. So it's a battle to memorise them and constantly review so you aren't forgetting all the words that didn't come up in real life.

I find I'm able to have basic conversations with people. Nothing too complex but all the getting to know you stuff and lots of practical things. How fluent I feel will depend on the day and who I'm speaking to. Somedays I feel like a linguistic virtuoso somedays like a bumbling deaf mute.

But every little bit more I'm able to use without thinking too much is another little incentive that things are paying off.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Buxiban Blues

So although I really like my job I'm going to expand on my problems with the buxiban system as I see it through the job I am in.

My company is a pretty typical one. One of the top three chains in Taiwan with schools in other countries as well. The working experience depends a lot which branch you are in. There are a few schools directly controlled by head office which I imagine would be pretty nice to work for as everyone at head office has their heads screwed on pretty well.

The vast majority of schools as I understand it are franchisee schools run by whoever had enough capital and fancied getting into the business. They may or may not know a thing about teaching. Almost all of them are driven by profit of course, these aren't philanthropic exercises after all. The problem is some of them will pursue profit in an intelligent and effective way and others will just pursue it blindly making short term idiotic decisions being a general control freak.

Some of the short term thinking I will ellaborate on. Apparenty there is this Asian cultural concept called 'face' which is vaguely defined. It is good to give it, bad to lose it and generally a strange concept to our western ways of thinking. Put as simply as I can it means people in Asian generally feel embarrassed or humiliated in the public sphere easier and to do anything which might cause a person to look bad is a terrible thing to do. Apparently one can also go very far by giving 'face' ie making people seem important or gifted etc. Basically people are very concerned about their public image so to speak. Now I can't say I have ever seen this 'face' thing in action and a lot of the white people I know will use it to explain almost any quirky cultural differences they run into simply as a matter of 'face' as if it were the driving force behind anything a Taiwanese person does. Anyway...

Anything that causes a parent to lose face is terrible as it means a loss of money. Any parent embarrassed about something would surely withdraw his child from the school meaning less money and then proceed to tarnish the name of the school causing the school to lose face entering into what I like to call a 'face losing spiral.' No, that's a lie I made that part up.

Anyway I was told soon after I got here that the children were never to get below 70% on an oral test and also that I should do what I can to make sure everybody passes. If someone didn't pass clearly I am somehow implicated as a shitty teacher because everyone knows 10-12 year olds are focussed information absorbing machines so if one fails it's clearly because I wasn't teaching them properly.

The tests at the best of times are simply a matter of logic so in that I believe anyone capable of detecting a pattern would be able to get a passing score just by inserting vocab into the empty spots and copy and pasting the example sentences for every question. More just a test of picture recognition and the ability to copy. Anyway I am sidetracked...

The point is that the lazy kids who refuse to pay attention in class or do their homework as well as the genuinely slow kids continue to be passed up through the levels. The books are structured in a way that builds up from the most basic grammar and sentences into more complex sentences so that you generally need to understand what has gone before in order to properly understand the new material. As opposed to just regurgiating sentence patterns.

So anyway a level in this course lasts 3 months roughly. Meaning that if a student were to stay back it wouldn't be such a drastic deal as they would only be three months behind. It's not like staying back a year at home where you are short one year of your life. Studying for one year longer in high school, seperated from all your friends and suddenly becoming the joke older kid who couldn't pass this year first time around. It's just 3 months and it isn't like normal school in that it delays your progress in the real world.

So the dumb or lazy kids rarely if ever fail, meaning that their parents never think that there is a problem. Even if it is suggested that a child isn't fit to progress into the next level a parent will disagree and the school will listen to the wallet ahem.. parent. So what happens is that the class will have some lazy students who don't try because they know they will make it to the next level anyway but don't really have the background English to properly comprehend what is going on anyway. Many of them just get bored and end up goofing off to cover for the fact that they are extrememly behind the ball. Or there will be students who are extremely slow. In order to go at the right pace that they understand everything the rest of the class get antsy and bored.

I once had a kid who was in a level 05 class. Classes only last for 3 months so he was at the school maybe 1 year and three months. He was terribly behaved if you tried to keep him on task and include him he would intentionally fuck up to cover for his not understanding. If you ignored him he started making a commotion and distracting all of the other kids and ruining the lesson. Almost all lessons ended with me yelling at him in the corner or sending him outside. Finally after much pleading from me to get this kid out of my classroom we sent him back to the very first level. 'How are you?' 'What is it?' '1-10' etc and he wasn't the worst kid in the class by about 2 students. The point was he wasn't even middle of the range in the first most basic level yet this kid had sat 4 exams and passed 4 levels to get where he was and didn't understand anything. Once we got him back to that original level his behaviour was infinitely improved. He was still lazy and a distraction but he was able to participate and wasn't going to act like an arsehole to cover his stupidity.

So anyway because everyone passes the lazy kids don't have the stick pushing them to try a little harder in class, why bother? But then they become arseholes who can't follow the lesson and try to cover for their ignorance. Classroom  management becomes impossible with a really spread level of students.

Which leads to my next problem of discipline. No matter how poorly behaved you can't kick a child out of class as they are bringing in revenue. You can't even remove one from the classroom as their parents paid money for them to be there so no parent wants to hear my child wasn't in the classroom.

What's more writing letters home to the parents detailing what an arse your child was in class today or ticking the needs improvement box more than on one occassion is a big no no. We can't give them any more homework as punishment nor can we make them sit on the side of the class writing lines as their parents paid for them to get speaking practice. As all of this causes the parents to lose 'face' when we say your child was badly behaved today.

So kids are really hard to control as there are few effective discipline measures we can use. They know there aren't any real consequences for their behaviour besides getting yelled at. So on occassion this will mean that the good kids barely get any practice time because the bad students are being constantly asked to stop talking, sit down ans pay attention. The whole class suffers because the school doesn't want you to punish a small minority. Anyway end rant..

So as not to end on a low note here is a pic of happy buxiban times

Teaching English buxiban style

So how does one teach little Asian kids English? Forget what you learned on your CELTA course. Or how you were taught to teach in your post graduate Masters or diploma of education.

We don't activate schemata, we don't elicit vocabulary and we certainly don't worry about guided discovery tasks.

We use flashcards and we drill sentence patterns. Then we throw balls, or hit them, or balance blocks on our head, or jump around with balloons between our knees. Anything to shake the boredom of being repetitively choral drilled with a class of 10-16 other Asian children. Then after we did something fun that had little to do with English we go back to drilling English.

I have a big box full of jenga blocks, balls, plastic hammers, cones, dice and balls that stick to the whiteboard when you throw them. There are a lot of sturdy wooden seats with a table attached lined up the sides of a long classroom with a big space for running around in. Very little Chinese is used in the classroom or in the text books. They have a sheet of vocab items that have the translation on them that they use to memorise the spelling. But they aren't required to memorise the translation.

So we have students chanting sentence patterns stimulated by pictures on flashcards. I'm not particularly against flashcards when it is an obvious concrete noun a simple picture is all you need to pair the new sound you are teaching them with its meaning. However sometimes things like verbs come up. Which can often be easily demonstrated with a little acting. But then there are more dicey concepts. Things like adverbs of frequency etc. At first I was flabergasted at why someone would think they could convey these things with flashcards. But then I realise that you need to use constant demonstration and concept checking to convey meaning. Flash cards just make useful props for drilling. It is possible for someone who is terrible at demonstrating and concept checking to have kids who are able to answer all the questions correctly on the test yet only have the faintest idea as to what they are saying. They are just responding with the correct answer to the question. Like saliva and the bell with Pavlov's dogs.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Teaching Engrish or trying to learn Asian kids up real good


So what is the job like? Apart from dealing with all of the living differences and cultural barriers the biggest part of your life out here is your job.

To start with the vast majority of Western expats working out here work in what is known as a buxiban 補習班 or extra privately owned schooling outside of school. The kids go to school from early in the morning until 1-2 ish. At which point they are transfered to the buxiban usually as an extra pick up service as a part of the schools fees. Although not for everybody these schools are extremely popular. In major city centres you can find several around the bigger elementary schools as well as quite a few in the busy down town areas.

So this means you will be working roughly from 1-9ish each day depending on your particular schedule with quite a few 4:30 starts and the average seems to be about 20-30 work hours every week not including prep and test marking time.

So why do the parents send their kids to these schools? As far as I can work out English at the elementary school level focusses mainly on grammar translation without much opportunity for speaking practice nor a lot of listening opportunities as the lesson is most likely conducted in Chinese. Also there seems to be a lot of bad pronunciation being taught at elementary schools. For instance my children will often say 'ello' instead of 'ell' for the letter 'l' or 'effoo' instead of 'f' many Taiwanese will insist my teacher told me to say it this way. Moreover being the Asian culture that it is here parents put quite a lot of weight into the educational and employment achievements of their child. Parents desperately want their children to succeed and get high paying jobs their prospects of which (business and engineering) are greatly assisted by having good English. Also university entrance here is extremely competitive. There are quite a few positions but fewer good universities and people care greatly about which university you went to.

So all of this comes together to mean that parents will do all they can to give their children a leg up. I also notice that quite a lot of parents work very long hours anyway and probably just need somewhere they can leave their kids in the gap between school finishing and them leaving work making buxibans somewhat of an educational day care centre.

Why so many foreigners? I've never actually met a local elementary teacher or been able to watch a local class. So I can't really say for sure what the standard of teaching is like. As to why the buxibans don't hire local teachers to teach the students I'm not sure. As apart of the process here many of us have TAs or teaching assistants. The vast majority are female and between the ages of 20-25. The part timers are usually university students, some English majors, some not. The there are a few fulltimers who are usually not much older than 25 as they usually do the job for a few years after university as a way to improve their English then move on to find better paying and more fullfilling work. Some of the ones who have been there for a long time definitely have the ability to do what we do. For the most part the teaching revolves around drilling sentence patterns and vocab with quite a lot of games thrown in. Apart from correct pronunciation and an ear for correcting it you don't need amazing English to do it. The most challenging part of teaching is finding ways to keep the kids entertained and make the drilling bareable. You don't need great grammar because you are just drilling a sentence pattern. It's already there as to the whys and wherefores of the grammar any explanation you have is likely to fall on deaf ears as the children don't understand the language you are using to explain it until they get to a higher level and have acquired enough to make explanations possible. Explaining grammar points in the mother language is much more efficient.

So anyway although there are a few problems with the English teaching of the locals some of the more experienced TA's could do our job but still get paid quite poorly for it. I think I'll save the rest for another post.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

What's Taiwan like?

When I first got to Taiwan I was a little unsure of what to expect. I hadn't heard much about it before, it isn't much of a blip on the Asian backpacking circuit. It isn't famed for it's beaches it bottom price bargain shopping, the warmth of its locals or its incredible cuisine. After being here for a while you can see how it doesn't really fit into either expensive package tourism for old people or the budget backpacking circuit. But that's a little unfair as Taiwan does have a lot going for it.

It is quite cheap here, but you won't have beggars or street sales people harrassing you because of poverty. Nor will you have to endure heart breaking poverty that you feel powerless to prevent.

The cuisine isn't world famous but it is quite good and the island is progressed enough to get a good sampling of foods from around the world and immigrants setting up shop here.

The locals aren't amazed at seeing a white person nor are they trying to solicit your money with fake friendliness yet they are helpful and polite.

The beaches aren't world famous but there are a smattering of very tolerable ones (and some not so tolerable). As well as some very nice scenic areas and mountains which you don't have to drive for half a day to get to from the cities. Although on weekends it seems that half the island is there with you.

Taiwan is very easy to travel around being such a small island and you can reach almost any corner of it for a weekend stay. The real tourist attractions are Kenting beach national park in the south. Which is as nice as any I have been to, without the sleeze and overdevelopment of some of Thailand's. Taroko Gorge in the northeast has some stunning scenery and nature hikes. But the roads can only handle so much traffic so on weekends it can get really packed. Taipei is truly an international world class city with bucketloads going for it. Great restaurants, museums, night clubs, temples, cultural exhibitions and more. Tainan in the south is a great city with a lot of interesting temples and colonial history.


The negatives- Taiwan is quite a crowded little island, although streets can on occassion be quite spacious there is a general noticable crowding. Parking for the car driver can be difficult in city centres. At peak times and on weekends traffic can be terrible and there is a very noticeable polution problem here.

The weather can range from uncomfortably hot and sticky to miserably wet and windy. It does have some very nice weather too but at either end of the spectrum it is quite unpleasant.

First Impressions- When I got here I was suprised at how developed it was. I have never been to Japan or Korea but Taiwan is the most developed Asian country I have been to. You can find all the amenities and comforts of home although not always as comparatively cheap as everything else. Although the streets are largely clean in a litter sense there is still the pollution and smelly sewer syndrome to be found in other countries. That lets you know you are in Asia. For your average person scooters are the main form of transport here and they are every where. Chinese is quite an exotic looking form of writing for westerners especially the traditional form found in Taiwan. It's especially noticeable as most places in the city centres and shopping districts try to out do each other with the size and brightness of their neon signs which gives the place a kind of Chinese las vegas feel. I must admit I really liked the look of it when I first arrived.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

How did I get here?

I guess the question now is how did I get here? After realising I loved traveling and researching it as much as I could on the internet especially at English Teacher X I realised that it was possible to live overseas and sell the one thing I have been doing for nearly 25 years, which is speaking English. All you need is a three year bachelors degree in anything and 1 month teaching ESL certificate.

While in Vietnam and then later India I met quite a lot of English teachers who were working in various countries teaching who all seemed to love it. They all said it was like travelling but you can get paid at the same time. What's more when you get holidays you are a cheap flight away from your next destination rather than $1500 worth of return flights.

Interest heavily piqued I researched it a lot on the internet and came down to three countries where I could possibly live and work Korea, China and Taiwan. From what I could work out Korea was the highest paying but many people didn't especially like working there. The Korean workplace culture is heavily confucian infuenced, your bosses can be arseholes and there is a general dislike towards foreigners amongst some.Koreans. So good money but an unhappy experience and Korea was off the list. China was meant to be cool but because it is still a poor country the pay is low. Although you could survive quite easily off of what you make (as everything is extremely cheap) you can't save the money to travel to other places or anything to bring home. A man I met in India was also a teacher here in Taipei and couldn't reccomend the place enough. Attractive women, a good job, good food and pleasant locals. So I decided Taiwan was where I would go.

After returning from India and with no job in hand I had enough money left over to enroll in a CELTA course. The world standard in English teaching and the worst month of your life. An excellent addition to any CV. The course was informative and helpful but pretty stressful. One month solid of studying in which you are in class 40 hours a week as well as needing to complete 4 assignments and write 6 well planned lessons. I was the only young person on the course. The other 4 being 3 experienced teachers looking for a career change and a former IT guy. All much more qualified and capable than I yet all of the women were reduced to tears and throw it all in moments and the man was hospitalised from the stress. The course was stressful for a number of reasons. Firstly the workload was high and the trainers expected us to be instant grammar experts. Our lessons were expected to be throughly planned at which point we were observed by our classmates and our instructors as we practiced on migrants and everything we did was analysed and critiqued by the humourless controlling instructors. It was enough pressure for someone who doesn't like speaking in public to have to endure let alone being scrutinised the whole time. Anyway the course content was great but after completing it I was completely moneyless and had to work for four months in various shitkicker jobs (factory line worker, office secretary) to save up the money needed for start up plus plane tickets. So what I did manage to absorb was almost completely forgotten by the time I landed here. Not that it matters much as CELTA techniques aren't really applicable to a group of screaming 8-12 year olds.

Before coming I had to save enough money to prove that I was 'coming to Taiwan for travel,' apply for a travel visa as well as having my degree certified by my university and then by the department of Taiwansese foreign affairs in Australia. Apparently you can't come to the country looking for work but if you find it here on holiday that's okay. I applied through a recruitment agency on the internet who soon hooked me up with a job. I was originally offered one in Taipei which fell through but was offered a replacement in HsinChu. The recruiter sold it as only being half an hour away from Taipei but without any of the costs or hassle. I couldn't find a lot out about it but it seemed like my only option, so HsinChu it was.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

8 months late

First thing is first.... I should have started this thing ages ago. I have already been in Taiwan for 8 months and thought I should get a start on it but just ended up keeping a personal journal, not really thinking anyone wanted to read my thoughts. But I also remember that before I came here I did a lot of research on the internet trying to find people who had already done the same so I could get a good feel for what I was getting myself into. Would I be throwing myself into a land of unreasonable Asian bosses, unsurpassabe cultural differences and boredom?

Or would it be the continued adventure I hoped for? Ever since my first travel experience overseas in Phuket Thailand at age 18 I have been in love with travelling. I went for nothing more than a mates holiday and a bit of cheap hedonism on a well known resort island. Hardly the stuff of Tintin adventures. Despite the place being a place for young white people to come get drunk, lay on the beach and buy cheap knock off clothes and for old middle aged men to come looking for prostitution I was still in love with the exoticness of it. Road rules seemed non existant, tasty food was served on street corners for cheap, prostitutes pushed themselves on you and open drains constantly smelt of excrement and rotting garbage. It was great, it had edge it had the excitement that suburban Australia always lacked.

Anyway another four Asian countries later and here I am. Living in Taiwan pursuing the travel experience without having to save up and squirrel my money away all year to spend a couple of weeks and months in another country enjoying myself before returning to the drudgery.