Background

A number of people have sent emails asking me what I am going to do in Taiwan. The short answer is: to study Mandarin Chinese. But to really answer that question, I have to give some background.
Two years ago, when I came back from Japan, I enrolled into Inalco, the national university for Oriental languages and culture, to study Chinese. Why Chinese, and not Japanese, you say? And why Chinese in France?
Well, I already spoke conversational Japanese, so I figured why not learn another language. Plus, I reasoned that Japanese characters are based on Chinese ones, so I already had a head start in the language.
I know now that that idea is not entirely correct. While it is true that Japanese characters are based on Chinese ones, many have changed their meaning in the same way that modern English has adopted new meanings for French words that became part of the English language hundreds of years ago. One that comes to mind is sensible, in English meaning logical or reasonable. In French it means sensitive. In Japanese, the characters showing a hand and a paper mean letter (as in a letter that you send someone). In Chinese the same two characters mean toilet paper. So that's the answer to the first question.
My friend Quint, with whom I taught English in Japan, asked me why I was learning Chinese in France. It's a good question, and it should be noted that the person asking has a Master's degree in teaching English as a foreign language. He knows that the best way to learn a language is to be in the country where that language is spoken. Most people would agree. But there is a corollary to that statement which many people are unaware of. In addition to living in a foreign country, the person wishing to speak the foreign language also needs instruction. Otherwise he ends up learning a type of pidgin language which, while allowing him to get what he needs, prevents him from being able to go beyond a basic survival level.
In my time in Japan, the foreigners who spoke the best Japanese were people who had studied it in universities in their home countries before going to Japan. Many of them were not from English-speaking countries and some could not speak English, giving them further incentive to learn Japanese. And some of them were-- you guessed it-- foreign exchange students who were there thanks to government scholarships.
So there you have it. That's why I'm going to Taiwan.