Expat Life
What is Right with Teaching English in Taiwan!
Rebecca Grace Kehl – Lifestyle Editor An article on what’s great about teaching English in Taiwan – or anywhere else in the…
Expat Life
Language learning and linguistics
9 stories
Expat Life
The collapse of the buxiban industry in Taiwan
Editorial / The Wild East Foreigners teaching in Taiwan’s ‘buxibans’, or cram schools are finding an increasingly tough job market, with sharply…
Expat Life
Taiwan’s English language education: A living dinosaur
The Taiwanese fare abysmally in international English scores. Why? Part of the reason could be attributed to the difficulty of learning such a…
Comedy
How to tell someone off in Chinese
吵架必备汉语 The must-learn Chinese words when you are fighting with someone. 1. Go to hell. qù sǐ ba 。 去死吧。 2. You’re…
Expat Life
Getting over the ‘hump’ in Chinese-language learning
Edited version of this article published in Centered on Taipei magazine, Oct 2013. Tired of being left in the dark when it…
Comedy
How to speak some basic ‘Street Chinese’
If you are like me, you are trying to learn Chinese, the REAL spoken-in-the-streets kind of Chinese. But all your Chinese-speakin’ friends…
Expat Life
How to Make Learning Chinese Impossible: Taiwan's Got It Down
Hapless Chinese learners agree: the Taiwan-only useless system of ‘Bopomofo’ ought to be immediately phased out, and the agreed-upon phonetic system of…
Expat Life
What's That Pho? In Remembrance of Loan Words Past
Parlez-vous Francais? French ‘loan words’ in Vietnam hark back to old colonial days by Danielo [Le] Bloom- [icelli] (Also published in the…
Expat Life
Taiwan tries to untangle mangled (but fun) Chinglish
Taiwan’s Commission for the Management of Language Use’s mission is to get rid of Chinglish, which irks fans of the island nation’s…