The Best Coffee in Taipei

Everyone who reads this blog even remotely regularly knows about my semi-fanatical obsession with two foodstuffs: 1.) sea urchins and 2.) coffee. With coffee, I'm sort of like this.

I've written extensively about coffee before, but haven't really come out with a post that clarifies where good coffee - the best coffee - can be found in Taipei. This is that post.

You can get coffee anywhere in Taipei, from 7-11 to one of the myriad Starbucks, Dante Coffees or Ikari chains, as well as in department stores and other smaller chains (such as Artco and Is) and independent operators. It can be as cheap as a 40NT 7-11 latte (which is not your worst choice, I have to say) or as expensive as a 500NT cup of Kopi Luwak or overpriced but still substandard coffee at a lot of chi-chi cafes (Bastille, I'm looking at you).

Unfortunately, most options, as in the USA, are mediocre at best, and Charbucks is Charbucks everywhere, with their over-roasted jet fuel.

The key to a good coffee is a light hand with the roaster (even medium dark roast is fine, but many dark roasts - not all mind you - are just bitter and charred), even grinding and scrupulous preparation, although I'm the first to admit that I use a regular old coffee machine at home. The best coffee comes from a siphon brew, but it is possible to get good espresso and non-siphon coffee.

I'm not interested in listing out the millions of places in Taipei where you can get a brain-smack of caffeine - I'm talking about genuinely good coffee that one can savor, that wafts down the street with its strong scent and turns heads when you carry it away in a to-go cup. Yes, you can find it in Taipei.

Get your cup of awesome beans (the kind that hipsters and yuppies would say have a "great flavor profile") at:

1.) Drop Coffee

Xinsheng S. Road Section 3 Lane 76 #1 (the entrance is on Xinsheng Road, not the lane)

I've praised this place to the moon and back, as you can read in the link above.

2.) The Best Roasted Coffee (TBRC)

Taipei, Shilin District - Jingshan Road #18: near the Wenhua University bus stop heading up Yangmingshan, and not far from the top of Tianmu Old Trail

This place is fantastic - you can buy a pound of coffee for NT500, and their home blend (a medium-to-dark roast) is only NT100 per cup, which is a steal. It's really tasty and goes down smoothly, so you don't need to drink it with milk (which is good, because the owner really will lecture you if you ask for milk or sugar). You can also buy cheesecake, cookies and other light fare here - the cheesecake is tangy and homemade without being too sweet.

3.) George House

Jinhua Street #247 - closest bus stop on a major route is Xinsheng/Jinhua along Da'an Park, also walkable from Yongkang Street

This place offers coffee that packs a flavorful punch - they take it very seriously, allowing you to smell the grounds several times to highlight different smells and potential flavors, and then serve it to you both in a standard coffee cup, which brings out darker, earthier flavors as well as in a small stemmed cordial glass, which brings out more syrupy, flowery liqueur-like flavors in the coffee. Not cheap, but totally worth it.

They also have branches in Taizhong and Tainan.

4.) Naruwan Indigenous People's Market

Guangzhou and Huanhe Rd. intersection near Longshan Temple

Try the "Ma Gao" coffee (馬告) at the booth selling Taiwanese local coffee here for NT90: the cup is small but it packs a strong punch of flavor, and best of all it's grown in Taiwan an (according to the vendor) is grown on aborigine-run farms, so you're doing good for the local economy and you get to try a Taiwanese local product not often found in stores.

5.) Roaster Family Coffee

#405 Sec. 1 Neihu Road Taipei (02)2799-4966

#123 Songde Road Taipei (02)2726-6085

#336 Jinhu Road Taipei (02) 2634-8803

#7 Lane 243 Jinhua Street Taipei (02) 2322-3830

B1 #14 Nanjing West Road Taipei (02) 2522-1681

This place is my new favorite find that you absolutely have to try. They're your best source of Kopi Luwak, if you've ever wanted to try it, and they'll brew it to perfection for you (I haven't tried it yet, but I will). I had a cup of coffee from Nicaraguan beans (can't remember which type) at their Songde Road location and I was blown away by the depth and spirit of the earthy, slightly smoky, addictive flavor. They siphon brew their good beans (lattes and other coffee types are also available) and there's a large choice of global beans, with a lot coming from Central America.

They also keep Jameson on hand, at least at Songde Road, which means they know how to make good coffee with whiskey.

Call ahead if you want a cup of Kopi Luwak - they'll make sure they have the most, ahem, fragrant beans for you to try.

Seriously - I love my Drop Coffee but this place is really just amazing, too. It's probably going to tie for 1st place in my list of favorite coffee shops, along with Drop.

6.) Black Bean Coffee

Zhongshan Road in Shilin, just south of the Zhongzheng Road intersection past Skylark and some other businesses

This place makes a good brew, if a little on the dark roasted side for my taste. A cup costs an average of NT150 - I strongly recommend the earthy but soft Monsoon Malabar coffee from India. They also sell handmade cookies.

I'm not sure if this place still exists - I haven't been there in years - but will check back soon to see if they're still around.

7.) Shake House (listed second in the post, after Red House)

Wenzhou Street / Lane 86 corner, across from Bastille, Gongguan

I usually praise this place for its homey, studenty feel and good selection of Belgian beers, but haven't mentioned how good their coffee is. They do not-too-bitter lattes, Americano and espresso, they make ice coffee in batches in a giant machine similar to a siphon, and their specialized beans are packed with flavor (try the Ethiopia Yirgacheffe or the Guatemala Huehuetenango). They can alcohol-ify any coffee order (just ask for it on request - I usually get a latte with a shot of alcohol added - I am fine with alcohol added to espresso drinks but would never add it to a good brew of quality medium-roast beans.

You can also buy the amazing Monsoon Malabar coffee here to brew at home.

8.) My Sweetie Pie

#3 Lane 93 Shi-da Road, Taipei

I normally don't go for espresso, opting instead for larger servings of more expensive siphon coffee, but My Sweetie Pie makes a not-too-bitter espresso that I can really get behind. It's still darker and more bitter than I normally prefer, but it cuts through the sweetness of their delicious cakes so well that I can forgive the extra roasting time!

9.) Fong Da

#42 Chengdu Road (near Ximending)

This place is wildly popular with both coffee enthusiasts and people who love old Taipei institutions. They still use vintage equipment and have a 1950s vibe going, and lots of different beans to choose from. I have to say that I find their brews a bit overpowering (not like the deeply but not jarringly flavored siphon brews I normally go for), but hey, that doesn't mean it's not good stuff! The brew at Fong Da acts like jet fuel to the brain and still gets my vote!

10.) Update: Rufous Coffee
Fuxing S. Road Sec 2 #333 / 復興南路2段333號
02-2736-6880

I was tipped off about this place by another expat, and realized it's basically just down the road from where I work. Fuxing S. Road south of Heping and north of Xinhai boasts three coffeeshops and a tea shop. The first is Tiamore, which has good (but not the best) coffee, is a bit down-at-heel and boasts a bevy of semi-friendly cats - or at least they did, it seems the owners don't keep cats there anymore since my last visit. The final one is called Mono, and I haven't actually gotten coffee there yet, but they serve it in glasses, not cups, and there's a shy but sweet cat there. Their mint and pomelo tea is great and they do a good brownie with ice cream.

Update: read below re: Rufous's siphon brews, but really what you want to be getting at this place is an espresso drink. For a very mildly flavored coffee, try the honey and cinnamon latte. For a luxurious experience, try the Irish coffee (with real sweet foamed milk, not whipped cream, to cut the bitterness of the whiskey-flavored coffee below). For a hot or stressful (or hot and stressful) day, get the iced dark chocolate banana latte. Their cold brewed iced coffee is also fabulous.

Only just today I continued on to Rufous at this person's recommendation, and the coffee was pretty excellent (I had a syphon-brewed coffee from Panama). The atmosphere is completely different from Tiamore, where I go for a friendly, very 台neighborhood feel - Rufous is smaller, more upmarket, more expensive. No cats, but the coffee is better. I did find the Panama to be lacking some of the depth of the coffees I've tried at Shake House (see above) and Drop (also above) - especially both shops' Sumatra coffee, and the Kona at Drop, as well as the Nicaraguan coffee at Coffee Family Roaster. The Panama coffee - ordered because I don't see beans from Panama on menus very often - was roasted a bit darker than I like it, as well.  However, it was quite good, and I intend to go back and try not only the house blend but also ask them to make me a light roast coffee, and see what they can come up with.

11.) Gold Diamond Coffee (金鑽咖啡)
Zhonghe, Xinbei City, Liansheng Road #41
新北市中和區連勝街41號

About a 15 minute walk from MRT Jing'an (walk up Jinping Road and turn at Liansheng) and near the 262, 275 and various other bus routes, this place is a good bet if you're stuck in the wilds of Zhonghe. A good place to rest after a hike to Yuantong Temple or if you are otherwise in the area.

This tiny coffeeshop nestled among a huge slightly higher end apartment complex (but not inside it) on a quiet side street was a surprise find for me: I happen to know a family who lives in the complex - I play with their kids in English once a week (I'd be hard-pressed to call it a class as it's very non-traditional) and have gotten coffee here. The lattes are strong and flavorful, with lots of bold character, but the thing to get here is light roast drip coffee. I was blown away by what the guy made for me, and they have many choices of bean.

12.) Cafe Booday
Nanjing W. Road Lane 25 #18, 2nd floor above the shop (very close to MRT Zhongshan)

While the food at Booday didn't blow me away - the desserts were good, though - the one cup of Monsoon Malabar I had there was pretty delish. They have a selection of high-end coffees including this favorite of mine for approximately NT140 per cup. On the high end but not impossible, and your best choice among all the cafes in this area for a good cup of something comforting, caffeinated and well-made.

13.) Other places I haven't tried yet

There are a ton of places I haven't had the good fortune to drink coffee at, but are probably on par with the places listed above. There's an especially large number of cafes in the lanes around Yongkang Street, and some of my favorite places to drink beer also make pretty good coffee (not included here because I wanted to highlight the best of the best, but that doesn't mean they're not also good).

If you have a favorite stop for high-quality coffee - the kind you savor, not gulp - leave it in the comments!

You can also buy great beans to brew your own coffee at home at most of the places above, as well as at:

- 里仁: organic food store in Gongguan (go to Roosevelt Rd. Sec. 3 Lane 283, and it's just down the lane from So Free pizza) - you can buy organic coffee beans from southern Taiwan here - very flavorful!

If you want to brew South Indian or Thai/Vietnamese-style coffee (that is, coffee with chicory, and add condensed milk for Thai or Vietnamese or just tons of sugar and milk to make it Indian) go to Trinity Superstores and pick up a bag of "Bru". It's not "good" coffee in the yuppie sense but it is the real thing.

Bopiliao

Some old advertisements pasted up on one of the walls along Bopiliao

On Saturday, as a side trip to our planned visit to Naruwan Indigenous People's Market (good food and good coffee), we stopped by Bopiliao - a newly restored segment of Qing Dynasty and Japanese era architecture in the historic Wanhua district. Bopiliao is basically a segment of intact Japanese-era shophouses, and behind that an alley of older, one-story late Qing shopfronts which have been turned into an exhibition space with a lot to interest kids (at least, kids who speak Chinese).

To get there, take the MRT to Longshan Temple. You can use any exit, but the easiest way is to head to Guangzhou Street - cross the street to Longshan Temple itself but turn right instead of entering (walking away from Huaxi Street Night Market). Walk past all the shops - this is also a nice area in which to look at cool old buildings - and you'll eventually come to the intersection of Kunming and Guangzhou. You'll notice that around here there are entire sections of shophouses - walk along those until you see an entrance to the inside, which will be directly next to the largest house on the end, which is a children's museum/history learning center.

Alternately you can exit at Longshan Temple's Heping W. Road exit, turn right, pass Sanshui Street and then turn on Guangzhou.

The section of old shophouse facades from Guangzhou Street

This is a lovely, atmospheric place to wander if you're in the neighborhood - perhaps sightseeing at Longshan Temple, but it's too early to head to the night market or dinner (for the record, I recommend the food in the night market along Guangzhou Street but don't bother with the food in the covered market along Huaxi Street unless you are dead set on trying snake - which I have).

The alley behind the shopfronts - main part of Bopiliao

The large building at the end - the only one open to the main street - houses a children's activity area on the first floor - kids can watch cartoons of George Leslie Mackay, James Maxwell and David Landsborough talking about bringing modern medicine to Taiwan. You can also see displays on "your grandfather's Taiwan" and learn about Lu A-Chang, a local doctor who also contributed quite a bit to the development of medicine in Taiwan.

The best exhibit? Clearly the one where you can pick up the receiver of a rotary phone to hear stories about old Taipei - the highlight is watching kids look at the old black phones like they're a relic of deepest, darkest history!

Upstairs there are more exhibits on medicine in Taiwan, mostly in Chinese.

The center is free to enter, but closes at 5pm.

It's a nice place to wander a bit, if only to see the inside of an old brick house, but it would be even better if there was English language signage so that tourists with kids would have it as an educational and kid-friendly choice for their non-Chinese speaking children.

Out back you can also play several easy, old-fashioned children's games, such as old-fashioned pinball:

I am completely in love with the old-skool robots.

...or "fish for the glass bottle" or that stick-and-hoop game:

After that - a pretty quick walkthrough if you don't have kids, don't speak Chinese and aren't fascinated by vintage robots (which I totally am because robots are awesome) - you can head into Bopiliao itself.

The entrance has a plaque in English and Chinese signed by "Dr. Hau Lung-bin". Apparently he really is a doctor (I didn't believe it so I looked it up), despite looking like a Muppet. Oh well, never judge a book by its cover. Apparently he has a PhD in Food Science from UMass-Amherst. Either he got into a PhD program because his father pulled some strings, or he's a genuinely smart guy who would have been a fantastic food scientist - but is just not that good at being a politician (although he keeps winning despite giving off the impression that he's all cotton between the ears). You know how sometimes being in the wrong vocation can make a person seem less motivated or intelligent than they really are? (I would know - I worked in back-office finance and probably seemed to others as about half as quick as I truly am because it was the wrong career for me).

Maybe - just maybe - if he'd stayed a food scientist and his company had hired me as his English trainer, Id've come home after class praising my clever, brilliant, insightful and intelligent student, Dr. Hau.

Or not.

Anyway, just thought I'd share.

Buildings are marked at the front with what they used to house - a tea shop, a barber etc. - and are now exhibition spaces. Most excitingly for foreigners interested in Taiwanese cinema is the room housing sets from the movie "Monga". This is also one of the areas where some of the signage is in English, and if you've seen the movie, you can appreciate it regardless. It is not clear if the scenes were actually shot here or the set was relocated here.

You may remember this set from the film

Nearby is the Daoist shrine where the young brothers prayed, the seating area where the older gangsters would congregate and displays of clothing and weapons from the movie, which I saw without subtitles and could only barely follow.

Not everything was open, but some of the storefronts looked authentically well-restored:

...but others didn't:

I'm glad they saved that Qing Dynasty painting of Astroboy.

The next section of the exhibit focused on famous artists of Taiwan, including an area dedicated to an old guy who makes heads for lion dancer costumes:

...as well as a Taiwanese opera singer, two puppetry masters and a few other people. This was entirely in Chinese so while it was fun to look at, there was nothing to keep us lingering.

The final few shopfronts are exhibits on naming statistics in Taiwan. Did you know that the largest percentage of Taiwanese people are surnamed Chen, with the next highest being Lin?! Wow, that was so totally unexpected! Heh. They also had breakdowns from census data on given names - I found a lot of my friends' names, but neither mine (白蓮) nor Brendan's (百川) were there - probably because nobody actually names their kid White Lotus, and Brendan's name, though much more common, is a bit old and stodgy - it's like the "Harold" of Chinese names.

What was interesting was that throughout each list of Top 50 names, male and female, girls with the most common names were consistently about twice as plentiful as boys. The top name for a girl (淑芬) - Shufen or "refined and pure with a sweet smell" - clocked in at about 33,500 girls in 2010, whereas the top boy's name (志明) - Zhiming or "bright aspiration" only came in at 14,200 or so.

First, I'm not such a fan of the boys getting names reminsicent of willpower, strength, learning and brightness whereas women get a lot of grace, purity, sweetness, quietude, demureness etc., but hey, I guess that's how traditional cultures go. If we ever have a kid (not saying we will!) she's getting a Chinese name that means "Fierce Warrior Dragon Princess Who Kicks Ass" or something!

Second, clearly there is a greater variety of boys' names out there, with a longer statistical tail: either that or twice as many girls were born as boys in 2010 (yeah...no). So we can conclude that families who have sons have about twice the number of common given names to choose from than families who have daughters - of course with the stroke order, elements, fortune teller etc. issues to deal with, nobody really has that much choice if they follow traditional mores.

A cool old advertisement on a wall in Bopiliao - I like the "Scientific Headcooler" ad.

The verdict? Bopiliao is worth a visit if you are in the area, and great if you have kids who can speak Chinese or are interested in 19th and turn-of-the-century architecture.

Otherwise, the tourism department needs to do a few things to generate more interest in the area. My suggestions:

1.) English signage please - it'll get foreigners interested in Taipei history to linger and help us learn more; and

2.) The exhibits are nice, but stick a coffeeshop, teahouse, restaurant, even a few snack or souvenir shops in there so we can linger and enjoy the atmosphere.

Mutiny, I Promise You

Back in 2009 I wrote about studying at Shi-da and gave my overall review of the place.

Final verdict: you'll improve your writing and vocabulary and there is a strong sense of structure so you always have a concrete idea of how you should be progressing. It's great if you a.) want to learn textbook Chinese to communicate and don't care how you sound to locals or b.) if you are interested in going into Chinese as a field of academia. That said, what they teach is entirely too formal, entirely too "Mainland" Putonghua (including heavy use of the 兒 sound), with lots of grandmotherly, old-fashioned words that nobody uses. I also criticized the fact that there are far too many tests, the place is far too politically blue (pro-KMT) and some of the teachers don't attempt to be more moderate.

Today, I'm back to criticize not only how Chinese is taught at Shi-da's Mandarin Training Center, but how Chinese and other non-European languages are taught generally.

You may have noticed - or at least heard discussions about - how few Westerners ever manage to pick up Chinese, Japanese or other Asian languages to a reasonable point of fluency. It certainly happens - I speak reasonably good Chinese myself, and I know others who are quite good, even fluent, in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cantonese and other languages. I'm talking ratios here: how many Western foreigners come to Taiwan and never get beyond a high beginner level of Chinese - the "I can order in a restaurant and ask for things at 7-11" phase? How many other Asians come to Taiwan and pick up Chinese comparatively quickly? How is it that Westerners are perfectly able to pick up European languages but flounder when they encounter a language like Chinese, which is arguably grammatically easier?

I want to note here that if you attend Shi-da, you'll notice something striking: at the lower levels you get either a majority of Westerners/non-Asians or a somewhat even mix of non-Asians and Asians. This is difficult to explain with sensitivity - yes, I'm lumping Africans, Latin Americans, Indians and Middle Easterners in with "Westerners" although I realize many of them come not from the West but from their home countries, but they are similar in their learning curve to Westerners and thus can be compared similarly against Asians.

At the higher levels, you get classes that are majority Asian - some Japanese, a few Koreans, students from Southeast Asia, occasionally a Mongolian. In that class you may have one, two, maybe three non-Asians. In my first class it was me and another guy, who almost never showed up and probably failed the final. In the second, it was me and two other Westerners outnumbered significantly by Asians.

It's partially true that while Asian students in Taiwan may not speak a native language related to Chinese, the languages they do speak are often Chinese-influenced, both in terms of spoken words and writing. You can hear echoes of Chinese in Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese and the idea of characters are far more familiar, even if not commonly used (of course, in Japanese they are). It's just as true that native English speakers will have an easier time learning a language that they are culturally attuned to and closer to - there is far more in common culturally between speakers of English, Italian, Spanish, French and German than between speakers of English and speakers of Chinese. That cultural affinity probably does have something to do with learning the langauge more quickly.

There's also the fact that it's easier to learn a language that is related, even if distantly, to your own, especially if there is a similarity in many vocabulary words. I'm not denying that these things are all factors.

What I wanted to cover today is how the methodology/pedagogy used in Asia to teach Asian languages - focusing on Chinese here, because it's where my experience lies - almost certainly has something to do with why Westerners often struggle with those languages. Yes, I'll attach a value judgment: I'm not going to be all moderate and say "the methodology is different but neither is better". I do think the Western system is better, and I do think that the system in Asia is in dire need of reform.

In short, it sucks. Here's why.

Flashback, 1996: the poorly-funded foreign languages department at my high school only offered two language options - French and Spanish. Wealthier districts often offered Italian, German, even Latin and occasionally Chinese but being a small-town high school, that was never going to be an option for us. My French teacher, Mrs. Q (now known as Ms. S) taught both French and Spanish in a myriad of creative ways. We made posters, we had cooking days, we enacted scenarios, played games, asked each other questions, occasionally did drills, had contests, wrote stories, watched and discussed movies, wrote (terrible) poems and held discussions and debates at whatever level we could. Occasionally we'd take quizzes, Mrs. Q paid attention to us as we practiced so as to offer feedback, and there would be a few tests every semester. Each test included an oral portion in which we had to talk to Mrs. Q and answer a few questions. The focus was more on communicative ability and less on grammar in this section.

The edges of this memory may as well be soft-focus, and the colors tinted with peach and rose.

I thoroughly enjoyed French class: in fact, I enjoyed it and excelled in it to such an extent that I also took Spanish just because I could, and excelled in that, too. If I could have added another language, I probably would have. I've since left most of my French and Spanish by the cerebral wayside - my brain gets choked with Chinese whenever I try to piece together sentences in either language - but traveling experiences have shown that the information is latent, not dead. In India, we met a group of French travelers and after about an hour of stumbling I was able to chat with them at a reasonable level of fluency. A month in Central America helped bring back a good portion of my Spanish skills.

Flash forward, 2009: more than ten years since my love of French propelled me into a Spanish course "just because language is fun". I'm at Shi-da's Mandarin Training Center in an upper-intermediate Chinese course.

We go around in a circle, day after day. Each chapter has approximately 45 new vocabulary words, some with sub-words. We learn them by going around the classroom, each student in turn reading a new word and an example sentence. Never a break, never a change. Around and around. Three students down, my Swedish classmate is reading some now-forgotten nubbin of vocabulary and the accompanying sentence. I do a few quick calculations to figure out what I will have to read. I find it, go through it, and realize I don't know two characters in the sentence.

One of them is easy enough to fake - I can tell by the sound element how it is probably said and have a reasonable chance of being correct. The other reads as a giant question mark: no idea. I tune out for a bit as two more students read their bland, unrealistic sentences - things like "Little Chen is always curious when he sees a Satellite News Gathering Van". Because I'm definitely going to say that or something like it in my life someday. Riiiight.

I get to my sentence, acceptably fake it through the character I can say but don't know the meaning of, and never will learn the meaning of, because while I do look it up and put it on my study list, it's forgotten in about a month. I admit that I don't know the other character; there's nothing else I can do.

"Really," the teacher says in Chinese - this is an upper intermediate class after all - "you should know this one. It was in Book 2."

Fair enough, except I never did Book 2. I self-taught my way into my placement. I know most of the material from the first four books, but there is no way I could have serendipitously learned every single one of the same things taught in those books. Even if I had taken the course that goes with Book 2, who's to say I wouldn't have forgotten something? At this point, I'd spent a year in China picking up the basics of beginner-level Chinese on my own, including very rudimentary writing and a few years in Taiwan improving steadily through self-study and one previous Shi-da course, in which I'd performed fairly well.

The next day it will be the same - we'll go around yet again on the Pointless Carousel reading sentences. Occasionally we'll stop to answer one or two discussion questions. We'll do the same kind of homework for each unit - it reinforces the lesson but is very repetitive and rarely anything better than yawn-inducing. We'll go through a bunch of grammar points - again taking predictable turns answering questions - with a few examples each, with very little time to expand on any one point. There were grammar bits that some students simply didn't understand, and after a few minutes of trying to explain them, the teacher would give up and say "study it at home. You'll get it".

Half the time the grammar "lesson" was a bunch of sentence structure examples, many of them too formal or old-fashioned to be remotely useful in daily life in Taiwan.

That repetitive routine was regularly punctuated by a test that focused more on grammar detail than genuine communication. Not until the final were we ever tested on our speaking, and even then we were tested on reading, not actually talking to someone. Every three tests we'd take a big test - generally we'd take the third smaller test one day and the big test in the very next class. At the end, we'd take an even bigger test.

Amusingly, the end-of-class feedback we were asked to complete was a bubble-sheet, with no room for actual individual feedback. There was a bubble for "not enough tests". Is anyone surprised that there was no bubble for "too many tests"?

So there you have it.

That right there is what's wrong with foreign language education in Asia. That system may work to an extent for other Asians who are more used to it - they probably received similarly styled schooling back home - but I'd argue they're more likely to attain a higher level in Chinese because the jobs they often hold demand it. An Indonesian, Thai, Filipina or Vietnamese domestic helper, restaurant worker, fishing boat laborer, factory worker, grocery clerk or wife is more likely to have to speak Chinese daily with her family, her bosses, her children and her customers than a foreigner arriving from the West, who often socializes with other Westerners and really only needs to be able to use Chinese in restaurants or taxis (at least in Taipei). If they're teaching English, their job, unlike their Vietnamese classmate's job, might require that they not speak Chinese.

For the Koreans and Japanese at Shi-da, I've noticed that while they often have the same employment or scholarship situations that the Westerners have, that their commitment to learning Chinese is more long-term. You're likely to see them for several semesters at Shi-da, whereas a Westerner might attend one or two semesters at most before heading home.

For the American-born Taiwanese and Chinese, I found at Shi-da that they progressed quickly in spoken Chinese and vocabulary (possibly because of growing up around the language at home) but moved just as slowly as the other Westerners in reading and writing.

Of course, not every non-Taiwanese Asian learning Chinese here fits into those categories, and not every Westerner only hangs out with other Westerners or teaches English. I'm being general, and those generalities break down at the individual level. Meditate on it for awhile, though, and see if I'm not right on a large scale.

In short, it's not the methodology at schools like Shi-da that cause other Asian students to forge ahead while Westerners often don't - it's the fact that they will use what they learn daily whereas a Western student may not.

I don't think that it has anything to do with studiousness or diligence, by the way: my Western classmates and I studied just as hard as the Asians in class.

I do think it might have something to do with the fact that other Asians who move here commit to a longer-term immersion study of Chinese, and the Western kids tend to go home after a year - and let's be honest, you're not going to learn nearly as much Chinese, and you won't learn it nearly as well, when you leave an immersion environment.

Really, though, back to the main point: it has everything to do with pedagogy.

I've seen some impressively bad teaching in my time in Taiwan - since when is going around in predictable circles to recite pointless sentences a good way to motivate students to remember and use what they're learning? - and it's led me (and some friends) to ask: is it any wonder that American students don't tend to pick up Chinese that well, when the teaching is so truly lacking?

This can be seen in language classrooms worldwide - I have taken a grand total of one Chinese course in the USA, but have heard from trustworthy sources who have taken more classes that the pedagogy really isn't any better over there. The teachers tend to be Chinese or Taiwanese, and often earned their teaching credentials in Asia. They go abroad and teach the way they've been taught to teach, which is to say badly. (Yes, I'm making a value judgment. So there). They apply the same drills, tests, repetition, archaic and overly formal vocabulary, useless bits and bobs of dowdy grammar, memorization and recitation to teaching abroad, and then they wonder why Western students just don't pick it up.

Or they don't wonder, because test scores are acceptable, and nobody has thought to actually talk to the students in Chinese to see if they could, in fact, speak it.

I've seen it time and time again: the guy in my first Shi-da class? It wasn't entirely his fault that he (probably) flunked out. I was partnered with him on the first day, when we'd introduce ourselves and then introduce each other to the class. I can honestly say that he could barely speak, though his writing was pretty good. He placed into the class partly on the merits of classes he'd already taken, and while I can't imagine that he aced his speaking assessment, he must have done well on the grammar and reading placement. He'd studied Chinese for years in the USA and come over here to improve, and yet he could barely communicate. Nobody had thought to have him practice actual speaking skills.

This has been a recurring theme in my Chinese education, by the way. I've always been among the best speakers and communicators in class, but I've never been among the best readers, writers or grammarians. When the grammar being taught is the sort of thing that nobody ever uses, though, I'm not sure that's such a bad thing (although it would be nice to improve on the reading and writing skills).

Another friend of mine, B., majored in Chinese in college. She can speak fairly well and for awhile was in a Master's program. She would tell me about people in her program who could quite literally not speak Chinese, but they'd passed all the relevant coursework and been accepted to the program, and they could more or less get by. Put them in a situation where they'd have to actually deal with life in Chinese, though, and they couldn't.

What you get from these programs are students who can pass a test in Chinese and know a lot of words and abstract grammar. You get students who can get into graduate programs and go on to academic careers focusing on literature, classical Chinese, Chinese linguistics or Chinese history. You get students who can do research in academic texts in Chinese.

What you do not get from these Chinese language programs are students who can actually speak Chinese.

Yet another friend is currently studying in a graduate program at Shi-da and has told me a few things that scare me about the program.

First, the pedagogy classes seem (from my perception on listening to this friend) to be something of a joke. They can be summed up as saying, "If you explain the grammar rule well and give a few examples, the students will know that rule and be able to use it."

Err...NO. If you want to really teach grammar and get it into students' heads where it'll stick and come up naturally, well, anyone who's taken a CELTA course can tell you how to do that. Here's a hint: an example and a few exercises won't do it. You have to make the students use it, over and over, in sentences they generate that have some bearing on real life (asking for opinions, narratives and predictions are always good ways to bring abstract grammar to the real-world sphere).

He's also mentioned that it does happen that other foreigners accepted to the program can speak Chinese on paper but in real life, they are often not that fluent.

What they're basically churning out are more MTC-style teachers who simply can't teach. Those newly-minted teachers will go abroad, teach Chinese and then wonder why the students just aren't picking up on it.

On an online forum, I came across a woman living in Japan because her husband works there. She didn't really want to live there, but was trying to make the best of it by learning Japanese. She quit the course that his work arranged for her, because it was very formally taught, very academic, and very "perfect grammar" oriented. She couldn't learn anything: too many rules, too little step-by-step speaking practice, too much impractical knowledge, nothing that she could exit the class and immediately put to use. Is it any wonder that she quit? Does anyone doubt that her classmates will learn beautiful Japanese and possibly do very well in more academic situations, but never have the comfortable, "wearin' my old jeans" vernacular familiarity with Japanese that a second-language speaker should strive to acquire?

I've felt for awhile that while there is still a lot to learn, that I've had that "old jeans" familiarity with Chinese for awhile, and it astounds me how few people at my level or even above it can claim that. Shouldn't it be one of every learner's goals?

When I said earlier that after years of being away from French and Spanish, I was able to dive to the back of my brain and pick up words, phrases and structures that I thought I'd forgotten, the image that popped into my head was Leo's crumbling subconscious in Inception (the image in that movie of the old dreamspace he built that was now in tatters is how I imagine second-language knowledge in someone's brain after years of non-use). I could do it, because I genuinely enjoyed learning those languages and the speaking, student-centered methodology by which I learned them helped them stay, a bit damaged but basically intact, in my brain for later retrieval.

I wonder if any of the examples of Chinese students above - the guy in my first Shi-da class, the students in my friends' graduate programs - will be able to do a similar quick recall of Chinese years from now if they ever stop using it? Will the less-communicative ways they learned the language work against them, compelling their brains not to store, but rather to dump, that information as it was not efficiently and deeply learned?

I've also met plenty of Westerners who are beautifully fluent in Chinese. Guess how most of them learned it? Some classwork, sure, but mostly from years of immersion, practice and self-study along with those classes. I've met people fluent in French who have only studied it in French class, but I have never, not once, met someone fluent in Chinese or Japanese who learned the entirety of the language in class. Of course, real-life experience is always going to produce better fluency (just compare Taiwanese who have spent time in the USA to those who haven't), but poor teaching methodology in Asian languages makes it all the more imperative for anyone who actually wants to speak well to take their own practical initiative.

In short, the Asian style of teaching simply doesn't work for foreign languages. It just doesn't. It's not how people learn to communicate. Drills and tests do not breed fluency or communicative ability. They don't increase confidence (if - no, when - I get my MA in Applied Linguistics, my thesis will probably be on the issue of confidence. Check back with me in a few years). I don't think this is even a new revelation.

When students - always adults - come to classes I teach at their companies - I see a quick surge of enthusiasm followed by rapid improvement in speaking and fluency, with slower improvement in grammar. I do think it's because I stress real-life learning and go through no repetition, drills, stand-alone round-the-table sentence-reading or memorizing. In contrast, many of my students have told me that in junior high school their English learning consisted of memorizing articles and being able to recite them, or drilling for hours. If I introduced a new, fairly common grammar point, I'd hear a lot of "Yeah, we learned that in school but we all forgot."

Why did they forget? Because they never had a chance to practice it through generating their own speech. You aren't going to learn and remember through memorizing and reading sentences created by others. The simple act of your brain reaching for that word or grammar point while creating its own piece of speech is much more powerful. The act of work, grasping and creation builds links in the mind, and builds more effective memory. I still do not understand why this phenomenal (and phenomenally simple) tool is not often used in classrooms in Asia. Of course, repeated and varied use of these things will cement that ability, and their use needs to be long-term and preferably through immersion.

And yet the teaching style that my students describe - the one that leads to "we learned it, but we forgot" - is just what teachers of Chinese and other Asian languages are using today, to pathetic results.

Compared to this dire situation, European languages come hand-in-hand with European pedagogy, and they've been taught in the USA for so long that more contemporary, student-centered teaching methods have sprung up around them. They can be genuinely enjoyable classes to take. With that sort of history and long-developed methodology, of course they'd be better taught.

I can only hope that the same will be true of Chinese and other Asian-language education in the future.

I'd like to see a mutiny, basically. An overhaul of how Chinese is taught. A re-vamping of what it means to be a Chinese teacher at MTC, another language school (TLI is somewhat better, I will say) or abroad. I'd like to be able to promise future students of Chinese that they'll be learning in the most effective ways and that they can trust that if they work hard, they'll attain some measure of true fluency or at least natural communication skills. I can't say that now.

So whoever is captaining this Ship of Bad Chinese Teaching, I'd like to chuck him overboard.

What's your story when it comes to learning Chinese? Think I'm wrong and want to tell me why? Got your own bones to pick with the system? I'd love to hear more stories about and experiences with language learning as well as (mature) debate. So tell me - that's what the comments are for!

Space Confucius

Feelin' sad for Japan right now. Happy that Taiwan has escaped a tsunami.

After a few Belgian beers at Zabu, one of my favorite Shida cafes, I was looking at my pretty new tag cloud...and realized that the "community_space" and "confucius" tags, due to the spacing, look like they read "community" and "space confucius".

So now I have to create a whole series of posts tagged "space_confucius". I just do.

Festivals 2011!

J over at Taishun Street has posted a useful list of (probable) Western calendar dates for festivals around Taiwan.

This plus the well-researched book Private Prayers and Public Parades - Exploring the Religious Life of Taipei, put together, make a fairly strong list of festivals one can attend.

Somewhere in the darkest depths of my hideous desk (like I said, stolen from a second-rate insurance agency office) I have an old calendar on which I noted lunar dates for festivals for an entire year, and can now use those lunar dates to look them up in any given Western calendar year. Once I find it I'll post my own addendum to this.

Reason #11 to Love Taiwan

Decent public infrastructure.

We were walking through MRT Jingmei and one escalator was out of service. Reasonable predictions based on experience could be made that it would remain out of service for one day, two at most while being visibly repaired.

"If we were in DC," Brendan said, "and this were the Metro, that escalator would be in that condition for several months."

"No," I replied, "it would look like that, but have more random stairs missing for no reason, with nobody working on it, and it would emit a creepy smell."

"We're talking about the USA as though it's a Third World country."

"Yeah, well, for the most prosperous nation on Earth, I sometimes look at the infrastructure, especially for public transit, and I think 'Really. Really? Is that the best you can do?'"

Of course Taiwan doesn't get off scot-free. Taipei has awesome public transit (sorry, Taizhong) but its sidewalks leave me scratching my head.

Things & Stuff

Some of my rapidly multiplying STUFF.

I've been thinking recently about stuff.

Literal, physical, actual stuff. And how I have too much (or too little) of it.

This is all tied in with my thoughts on what happens next year, when (whether I like it or not) I pretty much have to go to grad school. For the record, I like it in that I am sure I'll learn a lot and it will be a new experience and career booster. I don't like it in that I feel like I could get the same thing out of shorter training programs and modules, but if I want to go anywhere in my career, it's basically MA or bust. The job I have now is about as good a job as I'll ever get without a graduate degree in my field.

So the question has become "do we stay in Taiwan, and I attend the program offered in my field and go part time at my secure job where I am in a senior and respected position and pay tuition that we can easily afford...or do I apply for a more prestigious program abroad hope against hope that I'll get the aid that I need to make it financially feasible?" Even with a husband working full time, which Brendan has said he'll do, it's not easy.

Back to Stuff then. With a capital Ess.

There is so much I'd like to do in terms of decorating that I can't bring myself to do now. So much Stuff it would require that we buy. I hate our floor (I think the builders stole it from the same dodgy insurance company office they stole our desk from) and would install tatami in a second - or just move into a nicer place with a better floor. I'd love a ceiling not made of plastic, and lantern lights whose cords are not clearly tacked to the ceiling with electrical tape. I'd like actual frames or dowel drapings for my textiles (with cement walls there's little I can do about this). I'd like quality furniture that doesn't look like it was rescued from a curbside.

In short, I'd like an apartment that looks more sophisticated, more adult, more polished. More like an apartment and less like something rented by students with no money and no taste. We're not students anymore (though I will be soon enough I guess), we have money (for now) and we have taste (which is sort of a curse, if you think about it, because if I had no taste I wouldn't notice how crummy our Stuff is, or wouldn't care, and this wouldn't be an issue).

Is this possible? Definitely. Is it feasible? Yeah, I suppose. Is it logical?

Well, no, because if we don't know if we'll even be in Taipei in a year, there is absolutely zero point in investing in nicer Stuff and a nicer place in which to put that Stuff. This is why we didn't register for our wedding or ask for (or want) Stuff (though whenever we move home the gift cards we got will be very useful as we rebuild our Stuff collection) - we knew we wouldn't be able to transport, store or keep much of it over the next few years.

Reading Offbeat Home regularly isn't helping (I've basically outgrown Offbeat Bride, which rocked, but I'm not planning a wedding anymore) - everyone has such cool Things, and Stuff - including Stuff going on in their lives - and as an expat that's so much harder to achieve.

So. I want nicer (as in higher-quality, not just to show off) Stuff, but the expat life (which I also want) makes it pointless to try to acquire that Stuff, so I'm left with Stuff that I don't particularly like, and now that I've had that Stuff for years, it makes little sense to replace it with nicer Stuff a year before we may or may not leave.

I say "I" because Brendan cares far less about Stuff - even stuff like pots with melted handles -t than I do.

Stuff - like where to move next, whether to study and what Things you need - is an issue that sort of wiggles around in the back of every expat's mind. How much to bring, what you need, what you can buy locally, what you shouldn't buy locally, what to have people mail you from home, and how to get rid of it if you ever leave. Stuff is the main driver of makes it more expensive to move overseas than to move in the USA - while large-scale cargo options are possible (I know someone who worked for the State Department and had the privilege of a paid-for shipping container to pack with stuff whenever she changed assignment), let's be honest. 99% of us arrive with a few suitcases or a backpack. At that point, we either have to settle in a pre-furnished place or slowly accumulate furniture.

Don't get me started on furnished apartments in Taipei's expat community. Some of them are not that bad, but mostly what you see are desks with uneven legs held up by magazines shoved under the pegs, dressers with blown-out drawers, tables with icky stains that never seem to come off and the ubiquitous "mattress and box spring on the floor without a frame".

Or you can go the route we did - our apartment came partially furnished with some of the ugliest crap you've ever seen - orange plywood shelving, desks straight out of a 1950s insurance office, a plastic table meant to be lawn furniture, a press-board dresser and coffee table, mismatched chairs that are all broken now. One kitchy-cool wicker chair. We added to that my textile collection (India, China, Laos, Thailand, the Philippines, Egypt, Japan, Panama, Guatemala), a futon and a bunch of cheap stuff from IKEA and Nitori. An oven. A microwave, which broke. Another microwave, which broke. We need to buy a third but haven't quite figured out what to do with the first two in our kitchen. Piles of plates, dishes and glassware. Tchotchkes (including a children's lion dancer marionette). Some DPP flags. A dart board. More books than we have space for. A vase. A stuffed gorilla wearing a jersey that says #23 (that came with the apartment. Don't ask. I don't know either). A Christmas tree. A pressure cooker. A coffee maker. An idli maker (probably my most useless purchase - but I really love idli)! Not one but four sets of speakers - one that's actually decent, one low-end pair, and two mini-speakers which are great for use in class and small things like watching The Daily Show (no, the speakers on the Mac itself are not good enough for this).

Oh yes, and a Stupidface.

Zhao Cai next to our hideous desk, on our cheap desk chair, enjoying his space heater (he thinks it's his). Also, gotta love the floor. Ick.

It's amazing, while trying to live a comparatively scaled-down life abroad, how much crap one accumulates as an expat. It's amazing how much it cost, and how little of it we're going to get to keep...and how none of it comes even close to the nice furniture that I so admire in other houses.

This is something I hadn't thought about much until recently, when it became clear that next year we'll have to make some decisions about staying or going (at least for the time being), all depending on where it's the most feasible for me to go to grad school.

Most of this stuff presents no real challenge - junk the desk chair that's falling apart, sell most of the other stuff, and set up again in our next destination, whenever and wherever we go - but my mind keeps floating back to three things:

1.) I love the expat life and I love not having to worry about grown-up furniture - this allows us to spend more money on travel, which we agree is more important (and interesting) than furniture anyway.

But I do like good pieces, and my parents' house is full of quality furnishings (took awhile to get there, but it's great now). It would be really nice to have a couch that doesn't look like exactly what it is: an IKEA cheapie. It would be nice to have a desk that doesn't make me cringe. I'd love a set of pots and pans that wasn't kinda...sad. I do look around our apartment and think "it looks cute, comfy and colorful, but it also looks like we're still starving students, or perhaps artists, or schoolteachers after a few years of having no collective bargaining rights".

2.) We're going to have to get rid of far more than we keep, and I'm already thinking about how I really love our mismatched Japanese-style plateware (cheap, but awesome and hard to find/more expensive in the USA) and I don't want to have to sell that, or how our awesome thick foam bed thing from Nitori is totally worth keeping, or how I love my Indian pressure cooker and want to take it everywhere. And the books, oh the books. Won't someone think of the books?! We can't possibly keep them all, but I don't want to sell most of them! This is one area where Brendan feels about it as I do.

I already know we're not going to be filling up a shipping container, which means eventually we will have to resign ourselves to selling most of it.

3.) Ah, Stupidface.

We tried, and failed, to keep it simple when it came to material possessions in Taiwan. We're clearly keeping our cat, of course, but he presents so many logistical challenges. It'll be easy to get him out of Taiwan (no rabies here, so quarantine is not an issue - though it'll also cost us another ticket on an airplane, like a child would - we're NOT putting him in the cargo hold)...but what if we decide that I should study at the University of Melbourne next September? We'd need to find a cat-friendly apartment before going, or some other way to settle in with kitty in tow. After the program is up, we have to take him on yet another stressful plane trip, or what sort of certification/quarantine he'd need when leaving Australia.

I know, I know. We haven't even decided if we're leaving, let alone where we'd go. It's a bit early to get neurotic about this stuff. Or Stuff. Or Things.

But if we ever do get nicer Things and Stuff, clearly we'll be living the sort of more-settled life in which one owns nicer things because one intends to keep them long-term. Which means less travel and less adventure and more Stuff, which is exactly what we don't want (even though I'd like nicer Stuff - does that make sense?)

In our situation, it's going to come down to the decision next year. If I decide on the program in Taipei, we'll probably invest some more time and money into making our living space more polished. We'll buy pots and pans that don't make me sad. We'll do something about the floor and ceiling. We'll trade up for a few nicer items before tuition costs make that impossible. If we leave, we won't be doing any of that, and wherever we end up for my schooling, we're not going to have the money to buy much of anything, let alone quality items.

So, my question to the masses, if the masses deign to answer, is:

How does one live as an expat and still manage to have nice things...and Stuff?