Fifty-five students from 16 countries studying in Taiwan took part in a Mandarin and Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese) speech contest in Taipei yesterday, sharing their experiences in language learning and living in Taiwan.
Twenty-two-year-old Russian student Romar Mikhailovich, who is studying Mandarin at National Chengchi University, said he enjoys living in Taipei because it is a city “with restaurants serving a wide variety of food, with small food stalls selling inexpensive yet delicious gourmet food” and is “a paradise for shopping,” with large shopping malls and night markets.
Mikhailovich said he especially enjoys the hospitality of Taiwanese.
PHOTO: LO PEI-DER,TAIPEI TIMES
“The people here are so friendly and welcoming, especially to foreigners,” he said.
Indian student Gujay Royson Pais said he was invited to talk about Indian culture to 800 students at an elementary school in Kaohsiung earlier this month, after the school was assigned to cheer for Indian athletes during the World Games.
“I was very worried because I was only in Taiwan for nine months at the time and I knew I couldn’t speak Mandarin well enough to introduce my own country,” he said.
He didn’t have to worry.
“The kids probably didn’t understand what I was talking about, but they listened attentively with smiles on their face. It gave me a lot of encouragement and confidence,” Pais said.
He said it really moved him when the students sang Hindi songs and cheered in Hindi when the Indian team played in the Games.
Many foreign students said they chose to learn Chinese in Taiwan instead of in China because they wanted to learn traditional Chinese.
South Korean student Lee Ji-yong said her friends were all surprised when she told them that she wanted to learn Chinese, since she majored in Korean literature at university.
“But to really master classic[al] Korean literature, learning Chinese is a must, because before the Korean writing system was created in the 15th century, Koreans used Chinese characters,” Lee told the audience.
She said she first went to China to learn Mandarin, but soon realized that learning simplified Chinese used in China didn’t help her much, since ancient literature was written in traditional Chinese.
She therefore decided to come to Taiwan.
“I think traditional Chinese characters are more artistic as well,” she said.
However, when she came to Taiwan, Lee discovered another beauty of the language.
“In China, people like to speak very loudly, but in Taiwan, people speak more tenderly,” Lee said. “So it was when I came to Taiwan I discovered that Mandarin can sound so pleasing to the ear.”
A total of 15 students from Japan, South Korea, Russia, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, the US, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Germany, France and Switzerland took part in the annual event organized by the Rotary Club.
Also See: Work with China to teach: official
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,