Learning a Local Rather Than Standardized Language

As much as I complain about the difficulty of reading and writing here in Taiwan, I'm beginning to feel like I'm actually on the road towards literate fluency. I can recognize parts within Chinese characters, even if I don't know what the word is, and that makes looking up a word much easier. I even got a 98 on a Chinese writing test yesterday. No characters were written the wrong way!

I also feel that I am learning a plethora of useful terms, phrases, and vocabulary mostly from hearing teachers explain concepts that I'm already somewhat familiar with. They drop in words such as other, choose, answer, question, begin, finish, test, quiz, and so much more. So often I'm trying to get the point of something that is being said that relates to the here and now or near future plans, but I have fewer explanations from family and friends about grammar, sentence structures, sentence patterns, proper usage, etc. Now I have teachers who are paid to fill in those gaps.

I had a revelation today. I may have been learning Chinese over the course of the past three years, but the reasons I am not further along include:

1)     I have been focusing on getting married, graduating, and moving three times in one year (once internationally)

2)     While in the States I gave up on trying to use apps, Google Translate, or Chinese curriculum in general because they have simplified Chinese characters rather than the traditional characters used in Taiwan as well as a Mainland China pronunciation, accent, and usage of vocabulary that is not consistent with the Taiwanese way of saying things.

3)     I gave up on using Chinese curriculum in general because they seemed to all start at the very beginning with concepts I already know and were too easy or too boring for me to follow for very long. Since I already know greetings and some conversational Chinese it is hard to find a curriculum that is actually at my level.

4)     Since there can potentially be a wide variety of words that have the exact same pronunciation, or same pronunciation with a different tone, there is just too much room for error when trying to use Google Translate to figure things out on my own. I decided it would be better to learn more in person that virtually.

I've heard of people learning Arabic have similar issues when wanting to learn a particular local dialect. They were advised to wait until they were in the country they were heading to to learn the language in order to bypass the issues of learning a variety of a language that will not be useful for every day life.

Now that I am spending a year in Taiwan and it is the perfect opportunity to bypass all these problems I have previously experienced. I can make language learning my part-time, if not full-time, work. It feels rewarding to be mounting the obstacles which previously have been leaving me so forlorn!