Problems of Language-Learning Among Taiwanese Students

 

Foreign-language learning seems to be a great challenge for most Taiwanese students, and in recent years people have been spending loads of cash consulting English crams schools for the sake of getting a good grade in school, in the TOEFL test, or in the IELTS test. These students seek rapid improvement, but rarely do they take time to understand the wrong methods and habits that they resort to while learning languages.

 

With years of observation I have come to see that Taiwanese students use too many “vocabulary handbooks” (books that contain only hundreds of vocabulary with a Chinese translation and no English explanation). Such cramming is time-consuming, not to mention the fact that these books jeopardize students’ abilities to grasp the context where each word is utilized.

Another bad habit that Taiwanese students have while learning English is that they rely too much on “Chinese to English translation” to complete an English text. They resort to writing down Chinese and later literally translating every word into English using Google translation devices. In fact, “thinking in a Chinese and not English sense” could lead to serious miscommunication, and also it could mistakenly guide students to “write with an accent.”

 

One last bad habit that I witness among these students is that the memorize vocabulary "the hard way"; that is, they cram everything in without using logic to remember what they learn in class. They have no lexical observation and contain no idea as to how one should analyze new vocabulary from its roots.

These are some major problems that Taiwanese students should deal with. Only with this, an eager heart and a fearless mind can students anticipate to develop their language capacities to the absolute fullest.