Moving from America to Taiwan 8: Language Exchange

“I have a very important question for you,” asked the Taiwanese architect, “it’s about English.”

My life experience in Los Angeles had taught me that making arrangements to meet a 44-year old man I met on a website while using a Watchmen avatar would be a bad thing, but this is Taiwan.

I’m meetup up for Language Exchange, a process where you meet up with someone to spend half the time talking in their language, and half the time talking in yours. Obviously, I’m providing the English, and I’m meeting with native Chinese speakers.

I had been attending Taiwan Mandarin Institute for a couple weeks now. I pay $350 a week for 16 hours of class. The classes are great; they’re a mix of whiteboard instruction, listening, dialogue, games, and exercises.

But I’m really bad. I keep messing up tones, grammar, and sentence rhythm. At least I feel like I’m bad. In reality, I’m progressing at a normal rate, but I have the type of mindset where making one mistake is seen as complete failure. So even if I construct a full sentence, mispronouncing the tone of one word counts as insufficient progress in my mind. A lot of these feelings come from the fact that I am paying a lot of money to study Chinese, and I’m not working, so I feel that I should be meeting a high standard of success. I have a fear that if I don’t progress enough, then I’ll look back and feel that the time and money I spent were wasted. I think there’s a fine line between “taking time off to improve oneself” and “taking time off to be completely useless.”

My language exchange partners were my saviors. Adding two hours of practice each day gave me a stronger sense of progress. Additionally, I’m really lazy when it comes to studying on my own, so being able to have scheduled sessions with other people keeps me accountable.

Eventually, I ended up dropping my school and switching to 3 hours a week of private tutoring, augmented by 10 hours a week of language exchange. I’m trying to find the fastest way to improve for the cheapest price possible.

Tutoring has been good, but it’s lacking the structured approach to introducing more grammar and vocabulary, so I think the strategy needs another pivot. Next, I’ll try mixing in some online study through Yoyo Chinese.

The other great thing about language exchange is meeting people from diverse backgrounds and careers. Everything from police officers to marketing managers. It’s been great to connect with more types of people to get a broader understanding of what life is like for different people in Taiwan.

So, meeting with the architect, here in his office filled with books from all over the world, we’re trying to fill our language gaps through the most important questions about how we should speak.

“The question I want to ask you,” he continued, ”is whether or not it’s appropriate, in American culture, to say ‘lets rock’ as a way to state your intention to begin something?”

Of course I said yes.

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