As Taiwan celebrated Teachers’ Day on Saturday, many Taiwanese students and even English teachers misspelled the term as “Teacher’s Day,” showing that there is room for improvement regarding the public’s English spelling ability. This reminds me of the Cabinet’s proposal of a bilingual nation (雙語國家) policy last year, aimed at making English a second official language.
Although the government then released the Blueprint for Developing Taiwan into a Bilingual Nation by 2030 (二○三○雙語國家政策發展藍圖), the policy is going nowhere a year later.
One of the strategies in the blueprint is making the official Web sites of all government agencies bilingual. However, if you visit the English Web site of the Ministry of Education, you will find only one entry in the “News Updates” category for this whole month, and the “Events” category has not been updated for almost a month. Does the ministry really intend to promote the bilingual policy?
At other agencies, the situation is not much better. On an English Web page created by another agency to promote an international tourism event, the renowned Guinness World Records is mistranslated as “King’s Records” and “Kim’s Records.”
Obviously, there is still a long way to go before Taiwan can be transformed into a bilingual state.
To improve English proficiency in Taiwan, the government should increase the number of class hours devoted to English, and adopt more practical materials and flexible teaching methods. Unfortunately, it is busy training elementary and high-school teachers to teach all subjects in English even before students can communicate in the language, while turning a blind eye to the many local universities that are cutting compulsory English courses just to save money. By doing so, isn't it focusing on the superficial over the essential?
Eddy Chang is an assistant professor of English at National Taipei University of Business.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers