Reflecting on 2023 in Taiwan & Plans for 2024!

2023 has been an eventful year, both in terms of my own Mandarin learning journey as well as the Chinese education projects I’ve been involved with!

At the start of the year I moved to Taipei for my first ever experience of living in a Chinese speaking country. I spent the first few weeks travelling around the island, exploring the beautiful hills surrounding Taipei before catching the train down south to relax on the stunning beaches of Kenting.

As I’ve written elsewhere, those initial days were largely spent exploring local night markets, getting used to the local accents and learning essential phrases only ever used in Taiwanese stores, such as “有載具嗎？”

Returning back to the capital in February, I began my semester in advanced Chinese at National Taiwan University (NTU).

This was my first experience of learning Chinese in a formal environment – my only previous classroom experience being the weekly evening lessons at the Confucius Institute I’d taken as a beginner.

The course content was structured around Taiwanese news reports. We had three hours of classes a day combined with lots of homework and regular assessments to prepare for. These included reading and listening exams as well as delivering presentations on various topics.

I was able to pass the assessments with few problems, though the learning curve was quite steep at first. The hardest aspects were increasing my reading speed for traditional characters to a level where I could keep up in class. I also had to get used to the conventions of formal Taiwanese Mandarin, which are in some respects different from the mainland Chinese I’d previously studied (I plan to blog more about this soon).

I enjoyed aspects of the course and learned a lot. But I also left with the feeling that formal language instruction is probably not for me, at least not at this stage of my Chinese learning. Having studied Mandarin independently for six years, I’m used to being in total control of what and how I learn, rather than having my learning routine and goals set externally. I also don’t find language tests very useful – something I wrote about in more depth here.

Overall though, there’s no doubt that speaking Chinese for several hours every day while being immersed in a Mandarin environment for months on end was hugely beneficial. My confidence in my speaking abilities increased a lot and in July I went on Will Hart’s YouTube channel to chat in Mandarin about my learning methods and experiences.

Outside of my own learning, I was also involved in organising several immersive Mandarin Retreats, including our first ever five day summer camp in August. The camp, which took place in the stunning countryside of north Wales, featured numerous cultural activities, including lessons in Tai Chi and Chinese cooking as well as hikes to nearby scenic spots.

Unfortunately, being on the other side of the world I wasn’t able to attend the summer camp but the pictures look stunning and the feedback we got from the attendees was excellent. I can’t wait to attend our next one in 2024!

During the final months of 2023 I teamed up with Will Hart to deliver several online Masterclasses covering techniques for mastering tones, sentence mining and training your brain to think in Chinese. Our aim is to empower more people to reach high levels in the spoken language by using self-directed study methods.

So far our sessions have been attended by more than 50 learners from around the world and we have many more exciting online sessions and courses planned for 2024 which we’ll be announcing shortly.

Meanwhile, the I’m Learning Mandarin blog and community saw huge growth in 2023! Our blogposts and podcasts were viewed almost 100,000 times and our Facebook group more than trebled in size to 1.5k members.

The goal for 2024 is to continue growing and connecting with other likeminded learners. It would be great if we could reach more than 100,000 learners over the next year so please keep sharing the posts and podcast episodes with your Chinese learning friends!

Finally, a big thank you to all of you for continuing to support this blog with your thoughtful comments and heartwarming messages. I look forward to connecting with as many of you as possible over the coming year.

In the meantime it would be great to hear about what you’ve been up to over the past year as well as your plans for 2024. Let me know in the comments!

*Get updates on our Masterclasses, immersive retreats and future courses by signing up to the Mandarin Retreat newsletter

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