language learning -- the first impression

The school has two teachers for each class, one teaches two hours a day, that's the main class, and the other teaches one more hour per day, that's the practice class where the focus is on exercises and talking. Teachers seem to be very free in how they want to teach, they can use pinyin or bopomofo or both. They also have different books for both of the classes although the book for the one-hour class is not obligatory. One thing that's really good is that the teachers work a lot with dialogue, objects (or pictures of objects) and some role-playing, there is not much English spoken and this seems to be very effective. Much better to associate Chinese words with the things they denote than with words in another language (which for most students is only a foreign language, too!).

Learning the language is really easier, when it interfaces with real life. Once I have eaten, tang2 mien4 I know the difference to gan4 mien4. And also, the word for hot/spicy is very important so I can verify that I can actually eat the food which I buy. It seems that I have to do the discovery of Taiwanese menus and the related vocabulary on my own. First, ask the food sellers what they have, then go home and learn the characters for those words, and then go back and read the menu. Why can I not just translate the menu with a dictionary? Well, because I don't yet have the magic ability to find a Chinese character in the dictionary!

I wonder how long it will take to learn the characters for all the Chinese words which I can already correctly say and understand...