Taiwish

Since I am here to teach English as a Second Language, I thought I might share a few thoughts on what I have noticed, thus far, about the state of English in Taiwan.

Taiwan has a reputation among ESL teachers as being more hospitable to Anglophones who don't know the local language than most other countries on the globe. This reputation is largely deserved. Street signs, at least in large cities, are always in Chinese and English. I say English, not Pinyan (the most common Romanization system for Chinese), because words such as street, section, and road are translated, not just Romanized. Many businesses, even those that don't cater primarily to tourists, have signage in English as well as Chinese. And, while I have not yet visited every restaurant on Taiwan, I have noticed that a disproportionate number seem to have picture menus or at least menus with both Chinese characters and English descriptions of dishes.

That said, I have not noted a very high level of proficiency among most of the Taiwanese people I have encountered. In restaurants, I have noticed, waitstaff can often take an order adequately in English, but may have difficulty with questions about the menu or not understand the kind of polite banter that often accompanies going to a restaurant in the States. From this, I infer that waitstaff either:

a) are recalling some smidgin of English they managed to pick up at school, or at a bushiban similar to the one where I will be teaching; or

b) have received a hospitality-industry version of what we in the ESL field call ESP (English for Specific Purposes, or English for Specialized Purposes). This can vary widely across industries, but can include scenarios such as people being trained to take credit card orders over the phone, to wait on tables, or to answer booking inquiries on airlines, but given little-to-no English that is not directly applicable to their work environment.

I have spent the past week in Taipei receiving some training in teaching children (some will be as young as two and a half, I am old). In the course of this, I have gotten to learn a bit about some of the specific trouble areas Chinese speakers have in learning English:

1) Just as English speakers attempting to learn Chinese are often told that Chinese is too tonal for a Westerner to learn, Chinese people learning English frequently get the mistaken impression that English has no tones at all. The truth is somewhat different. English has tonality, but it tends to change the meaning of sentences, rather than of individual words (i.e., compare "Lydia is fifteen" to "Lydia is fifteen", with the emphasis going on the italicized word. In any event, as a result of this misconception, Chinese speakers learning English have to be trained out of a tendency to speak in an almost robot-like way.

2) Chinese speakers often add vowels to the end of words that don't have them--"Oran-jee" instead of "orange", for instance. In Chinese, virtually all words end in a vowel sound.

3) Verb tenses can be problematic for Chinese speakers because Chinese essentially doesn't have them. In Chinese, time is apparently most commonly indicated with words or phrases: tomorrow, last week, etc. There are some equivalents of modals (i.e., can or must). But time is not indicated by verb tenses as it is in English.

Additonally, from what I can gather, Chinese has adopted very few foreign words. Unlike what I experienced studying French in high school and Hebrew in college, there are very few cognates that can be relied on in either direction. For instance, in most languages, the words for telephone and television sound very similar to English--not surprising, since these words usually come from Latin, Greek, or a combination of both. In French, these words are le telephone and le televiseur (sometimes "corrupted" into the Franglais le TV). The Chinese words for telephone and television, from what I gather, sound nothing like their English equivalents.

Overall, though, I am struck not that I experience so little English day-to-day here but rather that I experience so much. In most shops I have been in, I have not even had to try to use broken Chinese cobbled together out of a Mandarin phrasebook. Often, the clerk knew enough to help me, and, in some instances, could point me in the direction of a co-workers who was borderline fluent (or at least, fluent enough to answer complicated questions about Taiwanese cell phones).

One thing that has struck my notice is that most Taiwanese seem to have adopted "English" names. By this I don't mean such stereotypically English names as Aubrey or Camilla, but names that are recognizable to Englisih speakers, whether English, American, Canadian, or what have you. I am told this is because Westerners just can't memorize the three-syllable-plus names that are native to China. So, for practical purposes, every Taiwanese child sooner or later gets rechristened Daisy, Henry, or the like.

It's hard to know how to react to this particular phenomenon. As an ESL teacher, I ought to welcome it as it will make my job that much easier. But I recall, from high school, a large number of Korean students who, within a week of arrival, would suddenly start calling themselves Sandy or Glenn or some other name that clearly was not on their Korean birth certificate. The reason for this usually had to do with the inability of Americans to pronounce these names correctly; in fact, I briefly roomed with someone who, for three weeks, was referred to around campus as, "I can't pronounce his name". In fact, the only person I knew who didn't call himself by an American name went by Kim, his Korean surname, because he realized it was well recognized in America.

I always felt kind of bad about this. Even in my less politically correct days, this just seemed wrong, that people should be robbed of their culture and identity because other people won't take two seconds to learn their real name. I tried, without much success, to get this point across to my school director, who goes by Eve but whose Chinese name actually means, "Small Wisdom". A name like this makes sense in the context of Chinese concern (perhaps over-concern) with appearing modest. I made clear that I would be happy to learn and use her Chinese name, if she so preferred. But she claimed, at least, that she had no preference in the matter.