A little background

If you've come to my blog, you probably know that I'm in Taiwan. A little background: I'm an electrical engineering major at UW-Milwaukee. A little while back, my uncle Jim told me that if I wanted to have a better chance at landing a good job after graduation, learning Chinese could be very beneficial. Maybe not so much recently, but China's economy has been booming for a while. Moreover, China lays claim to a fifth of the world's population. The common language there, Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken first language in the world with roughly 900 million native speakers (followed by Spanish then English with about 300 to 400 million each). These figures are rough estimates. So I thought to myself, what the heck, I had fun learning Spanish back in high school (of which I now remember very little), I'll give it a try. It turned out that I actually really enjoyed learning Mandarin. I have taken 4 semesters at UWM and audited the 5th until I left for Taiwan.

I was encouraged by a few people to apply for one of the scholarships offered by the Taiwan Ministry of Education. A friend and classmate of mine, Jake Gill (Chinese name 高健 Gao Jian, http://gaointaipei.blogspot.com/ ) received one of these scholarships last year and absolutely had the time of his life. So I applied and won it. I chose to study at National Taiwan Normal University's Mandarin Training Center for a few reasons. First, it's the oldest and most prestigious Mandarin Training school in Taiwan. Second, the head of the Chinese program at UWM, 陳雅芬 Chen Yea-Fen, who co-authored the Series of Chinese Language books that UWM and a host of other schools use, is an associate professor and former student at NTNU (By the way the 'Normal' in National Taiwan Normal University means 'standard' as this is the teachers' college in Taiwan). Third Gao Jian and my only American Chinese Teacher, Andy Olson 歐頌安 Ou Song'an, attended here and had nothing be great things to say.