Chinese Class Exclusive for You

In IMBA, we designed dedicated Chinese courses for ICDF scholarship students to support your adaptation into the new environment as well as create a new spike to advance your career. For new students, the Chinese class arrangement will be officially announced after your arrival. Here is a brief explanation on why and how Chinese class is offered.

  1. Chinese is not a mandatory course and your participation is entirely voluntary. However, once you decide to take the Chinese course, you will be expected to perform at a desired level of commitment and in case you fail to do so, you will be no longer accepted to Chinese classes sponsored by TaiwanICDF scholarship.
  2. Substantial Chinese class hours will be offered to equip students well to pass Chinese proficiency test (TOCFL) at certain level.
  3. TOCFL test is not mandatory. Scholarship will subsidize TOCFL test once.
  4. Class would be offered in the first, second and third semesters: 6 class hours each week. There is no class for the fourth semester, summer and winter breaks.

Curriculum and Policy

Chinese Class Curriculum and Policy  (Please click)

Motivation and Advice for Learning Chinese

Javier (IMBA 2014-entered) is praised as a role model of efficient Chinese learning by his peers. Below is his sharing.

My name is Javier Peñalba. I have learned Chinese for more than 3 years; 1.5 years in my country and the rest in Taiwan with the ICDF Chinese program while also studying my IMBA. I will try to explain the importance of Chinese and give some advice on how to learn it faster.

The Mandarin courses provided by ICDF at NCCU represent an unique opportunity that can be exploited to become fluent or almost fluent in this language, having the chance to put everything to practice every single day since we are learning in a country where the official language is Mandarin. With this being said, it is crucial that we take the most out of these courses by diligently attending the classes and devoting the time required to do your homework. The teacher that we have, Gao Laoshi, is an excellent professional full of energy and willing to help in every single aspect that we might need, and the ICDF manager also puts a lot of effort so that the Chinese curriculum is improved every day. We really need to take this chance for our benefit.

I think it is all a matter of time management; if we are able to efficiently finish all of our other tasks from the IMBA classes in time, I am sure that devoting 1-2 hours per day to Chinese courses will not be a problem; it will on the contrary increase your language abilities a lot faster and you will be able to see results a lot sooner than expected. I would dare saying that if the effort is enough and time is managed correctly, after about one year of taking these courses you should be able to hold a simple conversation and to do day to day tasks outside of school by just using Chinese.

Benefits that we can obtain from this are uncountable. Apart from avoiding uncomfortable situations in which a language barrier is preventing us from smoothly performing a day to day task, it will also let you make lots of Taiwanese friends outside of campus; it can help us understand better about their way of thinking which in turn helps us understand the local culture; and can even help you get a translator side-job or work along with Taiwan when you go back to your countries. We have to remember that Chinese is gradually becoming one of the most important languages in the world, and what better than being good at it to be able to use at a business level in the future? It will definitely add up a lot of value to our CV.

Some of my recommendations for improving very fast are the following:

  • Challenge yourself. You know it is hard and many do not succeed on learning this language; do you want to become just another one of them?
  • Be consistent; attend all the Chinese classes possible provided by ICDF
  • Do a preview every day before the class so the lesson will run smoother
  • When you are beginning, make sure you are clear about how to pronounce every combination of pinyin letters; having a standard pronunciation will help you toungs to talk faster and communicate better, and will save face for you; ask the teacher or a friend to reinforce this aspect for you if you do not feel people understand you easily
  • Use the Caring Group service provided by NCCU; it is a free 2-hour Chinese course provided by volunteer professor’s wives at the Administration building’s second floor. The teachers will adjust to your level and will make it a personal or 2 people class; they will even organize a field trip per semester where every orientation and explanation is given in Chinese, representing a great opportunity to practice
  • When you have obtained a certain level, maybe after a year and a half of studying Chinese, you should start doing something that you enjoy but in Chinese. For example, reading comics (there are two comic stores on the NCCU main road), watching anime, movies, series, newspapers… your level will increase without you even noticing when doing this.
  • Get a language exchange after finishing book two and try to meet up at least once a week
  • If you like texting, find a couple of local friends or your language exchange and text by only using Chinese; if you don’t know a word, use a dictionary (I recommend Pleco, it has made our lives easier in Taiwan) and translate when you don’t understand something the other person said; do flashcards with these words, since they are everyday vocabulary
  • Take every chance you have to practice; for example, don’t try to feel so comfortable all the time by talking in English to your local classmates, go one step beyond and use Chinese with them, they will like it and will try to help you out to improve. Use it in the taxis with the cab drivers; when doing school errands; when talking to our ICDF manager or Lichi… it all adds up and every experience teaches you one or two words

I hope this advice helps everyone catch this language a lot faster. With a little tenacity and constancy and embedding yourselves in the culture and language, this should not be an impossible mission.