Two international students are from Korea.
Su Yeon Park, from Korea, had learned Chinese for two months.
When she arrived in Taiwan, she found the first thing about the difficulties in Chinese is that she doesn’t know how to order food and the shop owner can’t speak English well. Therefore, she always needs some helpers to translate the menu for her at the first time when she arrived in Taiwan. The tool she could only use is the dictionary app, although it is not convenient.
Song Ha Lee, form Korea, had learned Chinese for two months. One of the difficulties she had encountered is the four tones. However, because Korean character is similar with Chinese character, they are pronouncing better than other European students in class. An efficient way she found to learn Chinese is to find the resemblance between Korean and Chinese. Like impulse, this word has the analogous syllable between Korean and Chinese.
“花”, this word in Chinese has two meaning. In verb, it means spend, but in noun, it means flower. In Chinese, there are so many words have these rules (characters). The interviewees said that these words also confused them, but the grammar and pronunciation are the hardest part. When talking about the book they learned, they thought that it is useful; they could use it in the real life. Su said that she could order pearl milk tea by own herself, and she could also ask for ice and sugar. They also talk about that unlike English and Korean, when seeing the word, even though didn’t know what it means, people can still pronounce it well.
America, had learned Chinese for sixteen years, since 1987. Amie had learned Chinese in college, and came to Taiwan since 1996 and she is the professor at Department of English in National Central University. She said that pronunciation is one of the difficult parts. Like 多少(duo shao) and 大小(da xiao), she had confused these two words. For the native Chinese speakers, we are still even not familiar with the Chinese dictionary because the Chinese dictionary has it’s own rules that we seldom use in real life. Therefore, Professor Amie said that she once found out she is better than her friend who is a native speaker of Chinese and also major in Chinese in looking up the Chinese dictionary. Because she had lived with the Chinese dictionary since she learned, but her friend didn’t.
There is an app that she has used which she thought that it is a fast and convenient tool for learning Chinese than looking up the Chinese dictionary. This app is called Pleco. Using this app to take a picture of the Chinese characters the learners don’t know, and then this app will translate these characters into English.