Month 8 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan

September 8th, 2025 to May 8th, 2026

1. Changes 

Since my last blog, spring has brought a wave of unforgettable experiences. Alongside my daily Mandarin classes, I’ve taken a day-long trip to a temple, celebrated Tomb Sweeping Day, gone camping with my host family, made new friends, joined the Wenzao Ambassador program, and even returned to painting. Somehow, we’ve arrived at the final month in Taiwan.

During one of our last peer tutoring sessions, our tutors asked us, in Chinese, how we felt this program had changed us. Beyond the lighthearted shifts, like getting used to daily tea runs or the countdowns at streetlights, the question lingered. From this talk, I wanted to write this reflection, in no apparent order, on a few of the ways these past seven months have shaped who I am.

2. Habits

Firstly, an unspoken lesson I’ve learned from living in Taiwan, while living and working in both English and Chinese communities, is how easy it is to get by in English. While this may be unsustainable in the long-term, I have the help of English-speaking host family members, tools like Google translate, close NSLI-Y friends who speak English, and an international university campus with countless foreign clubs and communities. Slipping into the habit of speaking English in Taiwan is surprisingly easy. 

Because of this, I’m so grateful I’ve been able to make Taiwanese friends, French-Chinese friends, and join clubs as the only international student. In Zonta, I spent the first four months barely understanding what was happening, translating each slide on my phone and piecing together conversations with fragmented Chinese. It wasn’t until halfway through the year that I discovered two of the faculty supervisors are actually French teachers!

From here, I was able to form my first French-Chinese relationships, where I have to either communicate in French or Chinese to get my point across. Not only has this made speaking French feel like a walk in the park compared to Chinese, but it has helped me find meaning in learning both languages. I truly believe that speaking without a translator forms about a thousand times a deeper connection, no matter how bad your grammar is. Plus, in Kaohsiung, everyone seems to understand how difficult of a task I’m enduring, and many people are considerate of this!

Since January of 2026, I’ve also started taking French lessons with Professor Kolbe. The first 3-4 lessons were extremely rusty, as I was working through my old grammar and remembering easy nouns, adjectives, and verbs, but over time, my Thursday French class has become one of my weekly highlights. Just one and a half hours of spoken French a week has been incredible for my learning! 

3. Safety

Another difference I’ll look back on with a quieter gratitude is the contrast between safety in the United States and Taiwan. Taiwan is, unequivocally, one of the safest places in the world. While I was receiving weekly updates about rising crime across the US, a single tragic stabbing in Taipei, one that took three lives, felt like a national shock. The last time a similar incident shook the city was over a decade ago, in 2014. For a place that holds nearly a third of Taiwan’s population, that kind of rarity is almost unimaginable in the United States. Here, safety isn’t something you brace for or question.

There is also a rhythm to life here that feels deeply considerate. Large roads and streets feel safe to cross. Strangers return lost items without hesitation at the mall from experience). Children navigate public spaces with a kind of independence that feels almost unfamiliar, yet entirely natural here. Safety isn’t enforced in any visible, rigid way, as it is simply embedded in behavior and in expectations.

4. Learning Chinese 

Coming out of this program, I’ve spent over 400 hours in the classroom learning Chinese. Beyond that, through conversations with my host family, involvement in clubs, and countless hours of self-study, the language has engulfed my life over the past seven months. Since arriving in Taiwan on September 10th, I’ve found changes in the way I approach learning languages. 

The first lesson was building habits of review. With the help of another American student, I started practicing flashcards for our A Course of Contemporary Chinese textbook within the first month. Over time, I've memorized over 1,600 textbook vocabulary, alongside a countless number of vocabulary picked up through daily life with my host family. One of the most fascinating moments in this process is connecting spoken words to their written forms. Often, the characters look nothing like what you imagined!

At first glance, Chinese characters feel impossibly intricate. But as I studied more, patterns began to emerge. Each character is built from strokes arranged within an invisible square, forming smaller components, many of them radicals, that carry meaning or sound. Over time, these pieces start to repeat themselves. Seven months in, almost every new character contains something familiar, a fragment I’ve seen before. What once felt overwhelming now feels navigable. Memorizing for daily quizzes, about 20–30 new words, has shrunk from 40 minutes to just 15, helped by the 25 minutes I spend each night practicing how to write older characters that reappear in our sentences.

Outside the classroom, immersion has taken on new forms. Watching television shows with both Chinese characters and pinyin subtitles was invaluable at the beginning, but I’ve now reached a point where I can watch Chinese films without relying on English. To expand beyond classroom vocabulary, my favorite resource has been The Chairman's Bao, which presents new words while reading daily news, a lifesaver for a visual learner like me. The only challenge is that it’s tailored more toward learners in China. Every so often, I’ll confidently use a new word in conversation, only to discover there’s a distinctly Taiwanese alternative.

5. Future with Chinese

As I’m leaving Taiwan in 29 days, my thoughts naturally turn to how I’ll sustain this language after it’s no longer surrounding me. In mid-June, I’ll take part in the “OPI,” a live, 15–30 minute, one-on-one phone conversation with a certified tester designed to assess how effectively and spontaneously I can use Chinese in real-life situations.

But the OPI feels less like an endpoint for me. For the first time, I’m not just learning Chinese for a class or a program. I’m thinking about how I’m going to carry the language with me. Post-OPI, I want to be intentional about continuing to practice both Chinese and French, even when they aren’t the most convenient choice. I’ve recently read that when learning multiple languages, the most effective approach is to dedicate about 80% of your effort to one language while using the remaining 20% to maintain the others. Hopefully some semesters in university, one language will take priority; in others, it will shift.

What I’m beginning to realize is that language learning isn’t something you complete. So looking ahead, I’m less focused on maintaining a perfect language-learning schedule and more focused on building continuity: finding small, consistent ways to stay connected, whether that’s conversations, media, or even moments of thinking in another language. If anything, leaving Taiwan isn’t the end of this process, it’s the first real test of whether I can make these languages a lasting part of who I am.