my third week in taiwan, things are slowly getting better. i’ve learned how to teach from most of the (50+) textbooks, more or less, and now i just have to think up tons of “games” for the kids to play that review all the info. we’ve figured out the bus and train system, visited hong kong, found out where to buy various stuff, met with an esperanto person, soon i’ll know how to order from taobao by myself.
people REALLY REALLY do not speak any english here (though they speak it in taipei). occasionally you find someone who does, but ex. the rare cashier who knows the word “membership card” still doesn’t know the word “bag”, most people don’t know numbers in english so they can’t say the price to you in anything but chinese either. so my hideous “i want a bag” in chinese is still better than their english. also the taiwanese language, at least in spoken form, is really big here and most people seem bilingual in it and mandarin. some shops don’t have a screen that shows the price, and some taxi drivers say the price verbally instead of giving you the receipt to read. hong kong was super different, everyone was perfectly bilingually fluent in english, almost all signs were both in english and chinese, etc.
i’m getting by pretty well with reading and being able to understand the gist of stuff in chinese, it’s really not a big jump from japanese, so when i study chinese by reading most of what i do is looking up the PRONUNCIATION and not the meaning - meaning i’d be learning tons faster if the pronunciation was already in the book. so i really want some manga that has pronunciation (“bopomofo”) in it and i don’t know if they even sell that kind of thing, all the ones i’ve seen with pronunciation so far have been like picture books or encyclopedia books for kids that’re really boring. all the books and manga’re wrapped in plastic so i don’t know if, say, dragonball has pronunciation help or if i’m gonna waste 100 TWD on it when i buy it. eventually i’ll find a library and see what kinds of things have this bopomofo….
i’m gonna look up firefox addons that insert chinese pronunciation and stuff too.
good news is just, things are freaking cheap compared to what my normal salary will be. you can apparently get a 3-bedroom apartment with like a pool on the top floor of the building, for 11,000 TWD a month, which is…. a fourth or fifth of what my monthly salary *could be*. but i have to factor in living costs for 2 people, including constantly needing taxis to get to my workplace since it’s dangerous to walk, and i don’t know all that stuff yet.
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