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Thread: Learning Chinese - Taiwan or China?
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[quote=CHYNAGYRL,259396]Hi. maybe i can share my knowledge with you. There is a good Mandarin institute in Taipei called the Taiwan Normal University (ShiDa) and their Mandarin Language Institute. I visited their school and it's pretty good, and some news agencies like AP send their reporters there for Mandarin training. You can take classes in traditional characters and/or simplified characters, therein might be the advantage of studying in Taiwan versus studying in mainland China. I think it's more difficult to study the traditional characters first but it is an advantage to learn them first, then to learn simplified. You can deduce the simplified from the traditional, and unfortunately, its not possible the other way around. If you are a current university student (undergrad or graduate), I hear that Taiwan Normal University offers generous scholarships for Mandarin studies at their institute. They have maybe 200+ students there each term on scholarships, I think, from the Taiwan national government. They include a stipend and cover tuition fees. In mainland China, I don't think they offer as many scholarships, and the BLCU / Peking University courses are just the same price as Western tuition at a Western university. Not cheap. If you are really poor, you might want to go to a place like Guizhou and study at Guizhou University. Rent is cheap, tuition is cheap, as well as in places in Yunnan Normal University etc. Just my opinion, I don't think it's important to learn Beijing pronunciation as it's not considered "standard" everywhere in the Chinese speaking world. It sounds funny to some people, actually, even though Beijing people say they have *standard* pronunciation. Probably Liaoning (i.e. Dalian, or Jilin University are good places to study Mandarin because they have standard pronunciation w/o the strong Beijing accent). Anyhow. Another comment from my POV. People have said that Taiwan has retained a lot of traditional Chinese culture that mainland China has lost during the cultural revolution. Yes, this is true, most importantly they use traditional characters everywhere. *However* Taiwan has a strong Japanese flavour. It has so much Japanese culture, businesses, and to me it looks like Korea and Japan in their urban design. You can imagine this because it was a colony of Japan for 50 years. So... it's really up to you where you want to study. If I could go anywhere to study CHinese, I would go to Liaoning Normal University in Dalian or to Jilin University because those have pretty good reputations and are in fairly nice cities. And I heard that Guizhou is a nice cheap place to study too with a lot of local culture, even though it's a poor part of China. But if you go to a poor place, you'll avoid the capitalism and see more of the local traditional culture. Good luck. I [/quote]
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