Learning Chinese in Taipei

I am here in Taipei, Taiwan and having a fabulous time! It is a city so there is a lot more going on than in the Upper Valley. For example, there are lots of little booths and stands that sell dumplings, mantou (steamed buns), cong bing (scallion pancakes) and very fresh fruit. There is one little stand that sells fruit that is on the way to our Chinese classes, so we usually get some pineapple on the way. You can also get them to blend it to make fruit shakes and they are also delicious.

Our chinese classes are at a school called Mandarin Daily News and we are beginners so we are learning things Chinese kindergarteners would learn.  Before you start learning how to write actual Chinese characters, you have to learn the sounds, and in Taiwan they use a system called “Bo Po Mo Fo”. It is like an alphabet but with different sounds than the english one and instead of letters they use symbols that look like pieces of regular Chinese characters. This helps you learn the sounds correctly instead of trying to express them using our alphabet. It also lets you practice strokes and tones. After you learn “Bo Po Mo Fo,” you can start putting the sounds together like in English, to make words and then adding tones. In Chinese, tones change one word to another if you just say the word a little differently.
Our typical day is doing school work in the morning, walking to Chinese, having our lesson for two hours, and then doing something fun in the afternoon. We have visited lots of interesting places so far, like the Beitou hot springs, an almost boiling spring of water feeding a river which is cooled off a little and it fills big stone tubs that you can basically take a hot tub in. We also saw the building Taipei 101 which is the second to tallest building in the world. We haven’t gone up it yet, but are hoping to soon!

The food here is also amazing and we live in a place where there are lots of little restaurants, so most nights we walk around our neighborhood to find a place to eat dinner. We found a tiny dumpling restaurant  which is right around the corner from us and the dumplings there are outstanding! I’m having a great time and I hope this letter gives you a taste of Taiwan!

-Perrin

Guo Tie (fried dumplings)