2023年4月12日
I have a good friend from Australia whom I met during my time here in Taiwan. During middle and high school, he developed a large passion for learning Chinese. He grew up around fluent friends and their families, so their words were always a mystery to him when they would have conversations. He resolved to teach himself as much of the language as possible. As a result of his efforts, during his junior year of high school, he traveled to Beijing to represent Australia in an international Chinese proficiency competition. Now, whenever we go to order food daily, we try to upstage each other on our proficiencies. He forgets how to say "no lettuce," and I forget how to say "no seafood ,please" (請別放海鮮 Qǐng bié fàng hǎixiān). He's majoring in Chinese with the goal of reaching maximum fluency, even taking a class on old proverbs at NTU. For his career, he wants to go into humanitarianism while leveraging his fluency within his workplace.
I chose to study Chinese because I was also surrounded by a diverse community, with many Asian American diasporas. I already knew Hindi from my parents, and Chinese seemed like the next great language to learn, with the chance to learn about China's vast history and cultural knowledge.
