David on Formosa

Today’s Taipei Times has an article by Dan Bloom about learning Mandarin in Taiwan. The article was written in response to a a recent issue of Time magazine about the growing popularity of learning Mandarin and studying the language in China.

Dan quotes Mark Caltonhill who suggests some of the things that Taiwan has to offer.

Mark Caltonhill, a longtime resident of Taiwan, recently wrote an online commentary in the Taiwan Journal about his own learning curve in acquiring Mandarin. He noted that Taiwan was a very good place to learn and live the Chinese language, and is not in any way inferior to China.

Caltonhill wrote: “Whatever [a] student’s interests and specialties — art or history, religion or philosophy, literature, martial arts or Chinese cuisine — Taiwan has as much or more to offer [than China].”

This may be true to a certain extent, but Taiwan is still lagging behind in many ways in making Taiwan an attractive place to study Chinese. Visas are notoriously difficult to obtain from many Taiwanese consular offices. I think it is partly because the government fears many people coming here on pretense of being a student and then working illegally. If this is a problem then why not make it easier for students to study Chinese and then legally work part-time? This could encourage more people to come here and actually learn Mandarin.

Another problem is that many people think that only the Mandarin spoken in Beijing or the Northeast of China is standard. This is a prejudice that is unfortunately too often promoted in Chinese learning centres around the world. There is no reason why someone in Taipei cannot learn to speak Mandarin in a standard way that can be clearly understood everywhere. The issue of people speaking other dialects and Chinese languages can easily be separated from learning to speak standard Mandarin. Overall Taiwan probably provides a better environment for learning Mandarin than many parts of China.

There is also the issue of learning materials. Most schools in Taiwan use the same textbook and the amount of textbooks and other supplementary learning materials available in Taiwan is quite limited. Mark of the blog Doubting to shuo recently visited Beijing. He commented about availability of a large range Chinese learning materials in China.

The other thing that struck me about the bookstore is how much they had in terms of books for foreigners learning Chinese. In the town I live in, in Taiwan, there aren’t any books for teaching Chinese to foreigners. Even in Taibei, the large bookstores grudgingly devote one or two rows on a single shelf to books for foreigners CSL. This book store must have had about 50 shelves devoted to learning Chinese for foreigners. There were text books for English speakers, text books for German Speakers, text books for Korean speakers, text books for speakers of half a dozen other languages, books full of idioms and slang, hundreds of HSK prep books, books on various Chinese dialects, video collections… the resources seemed endless. I can only fantasize about living somewhere with such a cornucopia of Chinese learning materials.

Many of the Chinese learning materials in Taiwan still use Zhuyin Fuhao (bo po mo fo). Students of Mandarin already have to invest a disproportionate amount of time in learning Chinese characters. Why should they have to deal with the added burden of learning another system of writing in Zhuyin Fuhao? Hanyu Pinyin is used almost everywhere else in the world, why should Taiwan persist in being different. I am repeating myself here. I have blogged about this before.

I would happily recommend Taiwan to anyone as a place for learning Mandarin. Having lived on both sides of the Strait and I prefer Taiwan for reasons of lifestyle and freedom. However, there are still some areas where it lags behind China as a place to learn Mandarin.