Comments on: Ask Matt: Studying Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan

By: Tyler Muse at Lingo Live

Tyler Muse at Lingo Live — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 23:26:58 +0000

NIce tips. Interesting perspective on how writing comes into play. I’m a big supporter of face-to-face conversation, but I can see how grammar and writing can be important when it comes to a language like Chinese. Nice post

By: Matt Gibson

Matt Gibson — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 04:24:50 +0000

That is a really useful site, thanks Allison!

By: Allison

Allison — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 08:11:42 +0000

My husband and I live in Taiwan wanted to learn Mandarin at a slower pace so we found a private tutor. This website is helpful in finding tutors and language exchange partners: http://www.tealit.com/

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:06:39 +0000

I also studied at TLI and took the most direct route possible, i.e. one-on-one speaking and reading. I agree with you, Matt, that learning to write more than doubles your workload. I didn’t have the patience and I couldn’t see the benefit of it (that’s just for me, though). If you want something more in depth, you could try one of the universities – I know ShiDa is very popular for Chinese language learning.

By: Greg M

Greg M — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 02:17:56 +0000

I studied at TLI in 2000-01 in Taipei and I thought it was a great introduction to Mandarin. You’ll share the classroom with students of all nationalities, and class sizes are not much more than about 7 students, and probably smaller. There are cheaper language schools than TLI but I haven’t seen evidence that they are as good. Like Matt said, TLI teaches you Mandarin without teaching the characters in the beginning but they give you the option to study them on your own. Some Mandarin speakers think it’s bad to study the language without the characters, but if you start with the characters you might get stumped by the difficulty and not continue. I found the speaking-listening approach to be good, and was speaking broken Mandarin in a few weeks and after a year and a half of studying I was fairly fluent. If you study at the TLI on Roosevelt Road, ask for Mr. Zang, a great and funny teacher!

By: Matt Gibson

Matt Gibson — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:43:54 +0000

Thanks for the great info Greg! Nice website too. Your tours look awesome!