David on Formosa

ChinesePod has just published an intermediate lesson about Taipei. 

The conversation talks about Taipei 101, the National Palace Museum and night markets. John and Jenny then discuss some key points of the conversation and also point out some differences in usage between Taiwan and China.
I don’t subscribe to ChinesePod but occasionally listen to their upper [...]

Today I went to check out some of the campaign activities for the 2008 Taiwan Presidential Election. My first stop was the tent which had recently been set up on a vacant block near Xindian City Hall to promote Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), the KMT candidate. I was told KMT Vice-Presidential candidate Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) will [...]

I saw the characters of 大中至正 taken down from the main gate of Taiwan Democracy Hall last night. Then tonight at 6:30pm the final one of the four characters 自由廣場  meaning "Freedom Square", was put in place. They seemed to spend a lot of time adjusting the right hand part of the 場 into position. [...]

9:37pm, 6 December 2007

4:52pm, 7 December 2007 

5:26pm, 7 December 2007

5:28pm, 7 December 2007
Just before darkness fell on Taipei City this evening two workmen completed the removal of the four characters 大中至正 (dàzhōng zhìzhèng) from the main gate of National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall (國立臺灣民主紀念館). It was the latest step in the [...]

I had my last class of the semester at Shi-Da yesterday. The time seems to have passed so quickly. While I did learn some new things during the semester, I don't feel that I achieved my goals. 
I think part of the problem was that the curriculum and teaching style didn't really match my goals [...]

I had my last Taiwanese class for the semester at Shi-Da today. I enjoyed the class a lot, but only studying once a week I didn't really make much progress. Still I learnt some new words and had fun. 
The amount of materials for learning the Taiwanese language* is quite limited. I have only used [...]

Today I had my first Taiwanese language class at Shi-Da. Shi-Da offers the class as one of the cultural classes. They also have classes in calligraphy, name chop engraving and a few others. 
I have made sporadic efforts at studying Taiwanese but so far I haven't got beyond learning a few of the most common [...]

On a hot sunny Taipei morning our class from Shi-Da met at Taipei Station. From there we caught the train to Yingge (鶯歌). We joined a number of other classes so there were about forty students and five teachers. 
It was a great chance to meet some other students at Shi-Da. Most of the students [...]