You should NOT learn Chinese in Taiwan. #Advice

for a few of you out there for just a
few of you in the audience this video is providing a vice that is gonna influence decisions you make in the immediate future and that's gonna shape your life for years and decades to come and then there are the rest of you we're watching this for just the mildly amusing quality of knowing some more details about my personal life and experience living and working in Asia so on and so forth I love you people don't get me wrong but I have to be mindful about both audiences I'm here talking about the really important reasons why you should not not choose to learn Chinese in Taiwan the Republic of China this is something I've thought about for many many years something I've experienced going back to the year 2002 or 2003 dealing with I've lived in Taiwan at many different times in my life and I have experiences as both institutional learning and shall we say extracurricular or independent learning I have experience linking me to innumerable universities within Taiwan including and especially small Buddhist universities the English teaching universities the elite universities the humble universities it's not worth talking about my background I'm someone who's been in and out of Taiwan since maybe 2003 this is now 2019 I don't even want to add up how many years I've been on the island maybe it adds up to two years during that time I don't know but it is a few months here a few months there and I'm someone who's been a student of Chinese in several different institutions when I was a child when my first language my only language was English and yet it was still in the process of learning English I would ask my father questions such as the word infantry it looks a lot like the word infant are they related did they used to have the same meaning is there some reason why the word infantry in the military is spelled the same way as infant and even though my father spoke English as his first language and even though my father considered himself a highly educated erudite man he was made very uncomfortable by this kind of question I asked questions about the English language from age three that made my parents feel uncomfortable ill-educated stupid and unsure what to say on the island of Taiwan the multicultural situation that people are living in his so awkward is so difficult to negotiate that people are confronting exactly this kind of consternation all the time when you ask the simplest questions imaginable even about Howard is pronounced Howard is written what a word means the most self-confident people in Taiwan about language are the ones who will come out and say straight to your face that they don't speak Chinese at all they speak this other language Hokkien or they speak this other language Hakka it's a minority of people who embrace that identity the vast majority of people in Taiwan instead live in a perpetual gray area of self-doubt and self-contradiction where they speak read write and understand an uncertain mixture of Beijing sander Chinese Beijing standard as adapted preserved and promulgated by the government of Taiwan not as propounded by the communist government China and as Roy which by the way has a bunch of cute and memorable little features that separate it from standard Chinese as spoken in Beijing the word for garbage can is completely different in Taiwan they have two different verbs one of which means to look at a book and one of which means to read a book whereas in communist China they just have one verb for both of those functions there are a bunch of cute little oddities like that we need not go into in this video what I'm trying to get instead is the really deep level of discomfort that people have including university educated people including members of the social elite in answering and dealing with the most basic questions of what Chinese is and what is the correct way to communicate in the language this will extend to interactions you have with people on Facebook where you write some thing in 100% correct textbook Chinese and they find it incomprehensible and they can't explain to you why where they say to you no no no we don't say that in Chinese that way or we don't write that in Chinese that way and you might say back to them but that's exactly how my teacher at the university taught me to say it that's exactly how my textbook says to write you might even be able to hold up the textbook all right the entire population of Taiwan from the most elite university educated person to the high school dropout it was a job in construction they live in a constant state of uncertainty consternation and self contradiction with this it's very difficult for them to communicate to their own children what ideal they ought to aspire to in Chinese what is the meaning of correct pronunciation in Chinese and they muddled by unified by this incredibly complex and perplexing written language that gives it the veneer of being one language when really it's at least three or four just within the tiny island of Taiwan each language is at the other's throats I could tell innumerable anecdotes but one on one emphasize here is the vast majority of people here in Taiwan will not come out and say to you that they're speaking Hokkien Hokkien is also known as mean on you it's also known as Tai Yu just meaning the language of Taiwan but there were other languages of Taiwan and it's not the indigenous language of Taiwan that's a whole other story talking about the indigenous peoples it's just a different Chinese language I was once going up the staircase that leads to my apartment and that particular apartment here and sorry I was gonna say here in Taiwan in Taiwan oh it's a long exhausting staircase to get up and the woman living a few doors down from me open the door and just starts kind of yelling at me in her version of Chinese and I mean it seemed to be something important so I got up my dictionary and I was saying okay it was slowly repeating back to what she was saying to me it's okay there's one word here I don't recognize it all right and she was saying this word for land Lord was completely different the mean and word for landlords the Hokkien were I don't think she was speaking hacker I'm just guessing from context here and writing you know using my finger in my cellular phone dictionary I was able to figure out what word she meant and what the meaning was and it was something like the landlord is having a problem with the pump you have to tell the person you're renting your program something along those lines that I communicated to to my own landlord I guess whatever you want to say we were subletting um that woman from her perspective when she was speaking she was saying the same word that I looked up in the dictionary that had a completely different phonetic value these people watched the news with Hokkien being spoken and subtitles in standard Chinese the extent to which these languages multiple mutually incompatible languages are overlapping intertwined and mutual division it's something that's very very difficult for for any European to understand if you grew up with an Italian grandfather or an Italian uncle who couldn't really speak English properly he was nevertheless aware of when he was speaking Italian when he was speaking English and when he was kind of mixing the two languages together because maybe you know he knew a few words in the sentence for the net that lapse into Italian because he wasn't sure what the english-language word for some of that was okay the entire island of Taiwan is inhabited by people who have no idea when they are speaking Chinese properly and when they are not and I said much earlier in this video the only people who feel self-confident are the people who just openly say they don't speak Chinese and who demand to speak to you in Thai you in min and you in hockey and orang haka and in all of my experience all my years in Taiwan that has happened to me once once a woman said to me expect Leo what don't you speak cocky don't you speak Thai you and I said back to her no I studied Chinese and a university therefore I speak Beijing Wow I speak the dialect of Beijing which is the textbook standard dialect more or less we could now insert a lengthy diatribe about how the textbook standard language is not really the same as the patient I lacked okay so these are these are really deep cultural reasons that go back at least 300 years in Taiwan and the conquest of Taiwan by the Japanese only made it worse there were several generations in Taiwan that grew up with Japanese as their language of higher learning and scholarship who went to university of read biographies from these people reading writing thinking and dreaming in Japanese that was the level of Japanese you know immersion if you wanted to be an elite person to one and yet you make the goal that's only people who I don't know what's the University to study the humanities know for example anyone employed in the railway administration they all had to be fluent yet anyone doing this kind of engineering job science job so those were all Japanese language careers that had university education some some kind of college technical college education testing Taiwan really was part of the Japanese Empire and it's been politically convenient to kind of forget about that to sweep that under the rug I think I'm living in one of the only places people are open about it it's kind of another story where people actually openly celebrate their Japanese nests in my particular small town and techno right now there I think they're probably if you go to go to taroko gorge you can see some people who still fly the Japanese Imperial flag and you can ask them what that means to the politically okay so even like during the 19th and 20th centuries when Taiwan might have had some of the same unifying influences that say even Shanghai went through Shanghai very different strange history obviously Taiwan was not even incorporated into the standard Chinese linguistic sphere to that same extent that I was in and I would also say do not go to Shanghai to learn Chinese you know they that's really an incredible uphill struggle to deal with the difference we share I dialect and standard Chinese but again those people will be less screwed up about it than the population of Taiwan okay there are a couple of other cultural issues here that cut deep I want to mention so I've experienced as a student of Chinese I've experienced as a teacher of many languages including English recently I was teaching my own girlfriend Chinese I was her first sorry my girlfriend is white American you know she wasn't born a racist with any Asian language and I have experience dealing with these issues from various perspectives okay Taiwan had a reputation as the world's greatest place to learn Chinese in the 1970s when they had no competition when mainland China was a communist nightmare of brutal repression mass murder by state force people being thrown into gulag and mass starvation okay that was the period of time in which Taiwan of this reputation is a fantastic place to learn Chinese and some of that reputation still circulates today some of your university professor you're watching this they may tell you ho no Taiwan's this inspiring place the people who taught Chinese to Westerners to Americans starting with the American military that's how it started during that period they were themselves refugees escaping from communist China they weren't really Taiwanese people and the Taiwanese themselves of a whole political discourse and all these terms of that they were newcomers etc etc okay so that's also part of the fabric of Taiwanese politics and society okay and that period of time is over those teachers are now either deceased or incredibly elderly and they were replaced with a new generation with very different attitudes and very different problems in life and one of the other dramatic changes is the amount that they were paid yes I looked up formal peer-reviewed research I think one of them was a government report also was a Taiwanese government inquiry into why the quality of language education was going down and what the issues were in this this area of language education and that before point out look back in the 1950s 60s and 70s this was a really high paid job it was really prestigious to be a Taiwanese person teaching white foreigners and today it's not today it's a job that pays so little that especially in Taipei people can barely survive or can survive at all if you're at a rural university University in the countryside or something because the rent is lower the same rate of pay gives them a better quality of life but it's tough to get by so the prestige is gone the pay is lower the golden generation of artists and intellectuals who fled from communism to Taiwan and brought all this energy and sets of mission and purpose and who many of them during World War two were teaching Chinese to American soldiers you know maybe in some cases two British soldiers or what have you you know and then put all that energy and again that would have been an inspiring time they were poor it was post-war squalor but they were building new universities where before there were only rice fields you can imagine it was probably a very inspiring time to be working your way up from the rice fields and the squalor and destruction of World War two and everyone was afraid of the atom bomb harush MA and Nagasaki even that's a far away that was a unique moment in the world's history and you might have thought if you were alive that in that in the 1970s it was just getting rolling and gonna get better and better from there and you're wrong in the 1970s that was probably at its Apogee then after that and only got worse and worse who are the people who become Chinese language teachers today or even English language teachers until one sorry about time when these people who do it okay they are predominantly women who wanted to get married have a family and raise children and who have been stuck taking care of other people's children and are deeply frustrated deeply intact with their lives because they never got married and had kids that's what I've encountered again and again and again and that's include women I've known who were just schoolteachers English teachers it's included women I've known who became Buddhist monks and who became professors importance universities many of the female professors it is a stereotype it is but it's a stereotype I have to warn you about there's an incredible bitterness look man teaching a language it takes love all right it's like doing speech speech pathology speech therapy where you talk to someone who has a lisp they can't get the word right you help them again and again until they get it and then maybe they go away on vacation for two weeks and they come back and they're making the same mistake again you have to really be willing to help someone pronounce the difference between so and sure and for whatever example you want to use and of course the problem in Taiwan is none of the Taiwanese people could pronounce those three distinctly it's a great example I don't think we've asked but none of them can pronounce the difference between the Chinese number ten and the Chinese number four all right this is a really simple phonetic distinction at the time we don't have in their own way in their own language because it's not their own language right this is the problem nobody wants to admit to you right it takes a lot of love to sit down with a student say oh no you're not quite pronouncing a run right you're not pronouncing so right and you know that's just simple one syllable when I say oh no I see what you're trying to do in structuring the sentence but let me help you this is how to do it right - semuc it takes a certain amount of love and the teachers you deal with and so on whether or not it's because specifically in their case they're women who wish they had kids and never managed you they wanted to start a family and instead got trapped in this low pay not prestigious dead-end jump whatever Street it's not always that it's a difference during a different case I've got to tell you something today in 2019 2020 in Taiwan they do have the love they do not have what it takes emotionally intellectually or in terms of language or cultural background to be good language teachers in the Chinese language and that is why long story short you should not enroll in studying Chinese at that one is there an easy alternative no going to Beijing to live under a communist dictatorship in an unbelievably polluted crowded hellhole it's not that appealing going to Singapore going to Hong Kong might be even worse I think the challenge were facing in 2019 is precisely to build up institutions that can really teach Chinese in London New York Los Angeles Toronto Vancouver Berlin Paris I think the whole Western world needs Chinese teaching Institute's in all of its major cities because right now there is no good deal anywhere in Asia anywhere in China Taiwan Japan anywhere in the eastern world