As a Taiwanese-American who has not been to the country for 25 years, how should I expect a trip to go if my Japanese waifu wants one? My Taiwanese relatives love her and actually talk to her in Japanese better than I do...
I'm 30 now, has Taiwan developed massively over the past 25 years?
Please don't talk too much about it. The last thing we need is the loser bunch of sighsee to come in and fuck the place up. Let them believe it's a globohomo chud paradise of mask mandates or whatever they call that shit.
There's a fair bit of improvement from then, when the older expats talk about it. the subway MRT stations in taipei and kaohsiung, xinyi district in taipei, and the overall development of both rural and urban areas were significant in the last 30 years. It's technically "discount Japan" imho, but it also came into its own, the buildings aren't boring skyscrapers, the big buildings are only in the main streets, leaving the small lanes with small houses/restaurants/shops with a style reminiscent of what beijing hutongs used to look like.
pic related is an example of a classic lane in Taipei, one block away from the hustle and bustle of OP's pic. Makes for great night walks too
It's nice developed, public transportation like MRT, tramways or bullet train. Free WiFi everywhere and fun people.
https://i.imgur.com/lpCWi8S.jpg
Please don't talk too much about it. The last thing we need is the loser bunch of sighsee to come in and fuck the place up. Let them believe it's a globohomo chud paradise of mask mandates or whatever they call that shit.
There's a fair bit of improvement from then, when the older expats talk about it. the subway MRT stations in taipei and kaohsiung, xinyi district in taipei, and the overall development of both rural and urban areas were significant in the last 30 years. It's technically "discount Japan" imho, but it also came into its own, the buildings aren't boring skyscrapers, the big buildings are only in the main streets, leaving the small lanes with small houses/restaurants/shops with a style reminiscent of what beijing hutongs used to look like.
pic related is an example of a classic lane in Taipei, one block away from the hustle and bustle of OP's pic. Makes for great night walks too
>Makes for great night walks too
Yup and sometimes, while turning a corner, you come across picrel
>you come across picrel
i thought that looked familiar but many places could look like it. google says it is Taichung Yizhong Street Shopping District.
i stayed in a airbnb for a month in the block in the picture, going to the gym just up the road, got a haircut which took far too long at the barbers in that shopping precinct. the pictures make it look more interesting than it really is. there wasn't anything happening except for one or two saturdays in the whole month and the streets with chairs out were empty every night, as i was out every night i saw them at different times. it was the wrong end of the night market. the night market was much busier than that shopping precinct. the opposite end of the street is better because it is nearer the universities.
there was a good burger place nearby, Burger Joint 7.
>discount Japan
That’s an absolutely childlike retarded comparison topkek. You only think that because they are both Asian islands. Taiwan is nothing like Japan. Both wonderful countries but not similar at all
It's because people forgot what a weaboo actually meant. Not everyone who enjoys japanese culture is a weeb.
Weaboo used to be about retards that adopted exaggerated anime mannerisms and used their shitty, subtitle based knowledge of japanese at every turn, and copying other, often outdated or/and non realistic aspects of japanese culture in an awkward fashion.
/trv/'s definition now shifted to being someone who is actually knowledgeable about Japan.
Taiwanese aren't so much weebs as they have a shared past with japan as a former colony and have way more in common with the japanese than mainlanders.
https://mediakron.bc.edu/edges/uyghur-language/2019-midterm-projects/the-cultural-legacy-of-japanization-in-taiwan/a-taiwanese-engagement-ceremony-and-other-japanese-customs >In 1983, my grandparents celebrated their 20-year wedding anniversary with a photoshoot capturing them in traditional Japanese dress
Taiwan was occupied by Japan for a while so a lot of the older gen speak japanese and the culture still is there despite japan losing its grip over the island. it's obviously more chinese (minus cultural revolution bullshit) but jap culture is there in the ways they would be within a past-occupied country
indian men are known for being creepy and way too forward sexually both on the internet and in real life. combine that with all their bullshit scams (see:
I was in Taipei last week. The whole quarantine thing is pure theater. You sign a form when you arrive saying you'll do this that and the other thing. Then once you exit the airport, you can forget all about it. The hotel doesn't even police any of your shit. They give you a COVID test and tell you to take it after 24hrs. Mine went straight in the trash after exiting the airport.
You still have to wear a mask everywhere, even outside, which is so fucking retarded it hurts. The little police on the street or in the subway will give you shit about it.
>Japan with more sovl
That would be Hsinking, Manchuria. Not Taipei.
Taipei is unironically the only East Asian metropolis where I've seen open street defecation. The weather is also glum and depressing half the year. All the buildings are old and shabby looking. Things look stuck 20 years in the past. Also, mosquitoes in the city are relentless. A sign of poor urban administration as you can keep your windows wide open in Tokyo and encounter no mosquitoes at all.
>open street defecation
You just were unlucky, and either saw someone who just had the shits badly and had to think in a hurry, or some mentally ill person. I've been there for years and never saw anything of the sort. >The weather is also glum and depressing half the year.
Yeah, it's called "winter and fall", and the last years it's really been like that for a few months only. The rest of the time, it's pretty hot and sunny. You just have a week or two of non stop rain at some point it stops. And don't bring up the rare typhoons that hit Taipei with but a more than welcome fresh breeze during summer. > All the buildings are old and shabby looking. Things look stuck 20 years in the past.
SOVL, also that's complete bull and is only an exterior thing. Malls, MRT Stations, restaurants and housing actually looks more than decent from outside. I live in Yonghe and we literally have a marble atrium with magnificent columns, and that's true of a shit ton of condos in new taipei city, both north and south. >Also, mosquitoes in the city are relentless. A sign of poor urban administration as you can keep your windows wide open in Tokyo and encounter no mosquitoes at all.
Tokyo is a world-class megacity on the same parallel as Busan whereas Taipei is a very green, humid, mountain-surrounded city in an island that cuts into the tropic.
Just say you're a mandchurian liar and a jealous man.
>Taiwan 'expat' defending Taipei's utter inferiority to its East Asian neighbors.
Did you move to Taipei for reasons of low COL, laidback life, and easy women? I have no issue if you did. All are good justifications for a man to move there. Just don't delude yourself. I wasn't just unlucky to witness street shitting, it's because they don't build enough public toilets. The few that I encountered were dirty and poorly maintained. >Tokyo is a world-class megacity on the same parallel as Busan whereas Taipei is a very green, humid, mountain-surrounded city in an island that cuts into the tropic.
Singapore and Shenzhen are both green and humid and I can say the same about them. No biting insect issues, leave the windows open all the time. In Taipei you go to sleep without a mosquito net, and you wake up to bites. >we literally have a marble atrium with magnificent columns, and that's true of a shit ton of condos in new taipei city, both north and south.
This is every new apartment building in mainland China too. So what.
>no biting insect issues in singapore
Aaand thats where i'm calling BS. Having lived there for a year, it's unbearable. Shenzhen I don't know about, but a simple google search and you find all types of people complaining about that too. Now maybe you meant that there weren't a lot of mosquitos indoors, in which case that is true of all three, due to their use of AC and mosquito nets.
The irony is, I couldn't give two shits about you complaining about taiwan, as long as your reasons are legit. If you would've complained about the cockroaches, or the spiders, or the fact that the city is ridiculously small and you always feel like you're in a small village because you're always 1km away from rurality, that the country isn't interesting if not for hiking and Taipei, or that the expat community is basically boring boomers, i would've said you make a fair point.
But instead you're giving me a weird anecdote about how you saw someone who was probably ill poo in the street and telling me that a city that has an actual winter and little greenery relative to Taipei has less mosquitoes. The LARP has to stop. >dirty and poorly maintained
There are toilets on most MRT station and they're always clean to a T and so do some 7/11
I lived there. In urban developed/residential area there's no mosquito problem. Obviously if you go to Fort Canning park at dusk you will get attacked by biting insects.
Because he's a larper. He has no experience, just wanted to chime in to feel heard. Proof is his inability to answer to >2346135 .He must've mixed up Thailand and Taiwan, no doubt.
I've been learning Mandarin for 3 months and I'd like to second this anon's desire for some opinions on the process
I've been anki-droning for an hour a day, doing listening practice on mandarinbean.com, collecting and practicing a couple useful sentences, and not much else.
Aside from reading novels, my goal with the language is almost mainly just to feel what it's like to have a new language in my head
yeah the tones are the main thing keeping me form learning it. I cant graps them and if theyll apparently make me not understandable then whats the point
Three+ years of learning here and personally sometimes I feel like I've wasted a lot of time. It comes in useful dating chicks but I do wish I picked Japanese instead.
Why?
If your tones aren't perfect, when it comes to intellectual discussion 80% of your meaning or points will be lost or confused. Imagine some foreigner speaking English but slurs constantly their words and you can't even understand if they're saying concept, contempt or misconception, but it's like this for 80% the words out their mouth. That's what foreigners with mediocre tones sound like to Taiwanese and Chinese.
yeah i speak intermediate jap (going for jlpt this dec) and i focus on phonetics a lot because i hate the idea of sounding like a foreigner. It seems so ambiguous to learn tones for someone kinda tone deaf like myself
Thanks for sharing.
If you don't mind my asking, what's stopping you from spending two months or so intensively grinding tones? Why isn't it that simple? Thanks
You can't just "grind tones" in two months anon. Unless you're Vietnamese or some shit and have a tonal mother tongue.
If you're a European tones are a complete alien concept and will take years of grinding and attention. So many intermediate Chinese learners think they're hot shit but their tones are complete dogshit. Taiwanese themselves always joke about foreigners by imitating incorrect tones or speak in flat speech.
Imagine some Asian boomer that's lived in the US for 40yrs but still has his thick chink accent. He wouldn't be able to fix it in two months and neither can a Chinese learner.
12 months ago
Anonymous
You're retarded. Tones are literally noises you make with your mouth and throat. This is equivalent to saying someone could never ever learn to sing or play a foreign instrument, because the sounds are just too alien to comprehend and reproduce.
If you focus on tone pronunciation, you will get better.
12 months ago
Anonymous
Well why don't you vocaroo your opinion on the war in Ukraine anon so we can tell how perfect your pronunciation and tones are.
11 months ago
Anonymous
Also many foreigners fall for the chink compliments about how "amazing" their Chinese is and think they're already fluent when their somewhere around intermediate. Actually you're probably not fluent, they're just being polite because you're studying their language.
All I can say is try applying for a few interpreting roles and see how fluent you really are. Suddenly when you're faced with an actual challenge as I gave you might realize you've got some time to go before you've obtained general fluency.
11 months ago
Anonymous
Ironically, the tones aren't that hard if you're not completely tone deaf and can understand the notion of pitch. If only everyone was forced to only and exclusively practice their tones for two months before doing anything in Chinese, far more people would sound actually intelligible.
You can technically grind tones provided you actually exclusively focus on that and discuss how to do so with people who learned it in the same non-organic way.
Chinese folks telling you how to pronounce a tone is like telling what a color is to a blind person. It's so taken for granted that they've never truly learned how to efficiently explain that to the uninitiated.
I'll move the goalpost by saying that while you may not become a true master of spoken chinese, you'll at least be very articulate and clear. So by all means, if you're grinding tones, try to sound as exaggerated and retarded at possible at first. By the end of the two months you'll actually be way better than the majority of non chinese mandarin speakers.
Only as you practice it with the locals will you get the second aspect of Chinese musicality, which is basically the overall sentence intonation which will make you truly sound authentic. Of course you've probably learned how to sound natural if you're asking a question vs stating something, but you'll hone your skills better that way.
This being said taiwanfags are pretty tolerant when it comes to tones.
11 months ago
Anonymous
Studying tones doesn't just end when you can pronounce Pinyin somewhat accurately anon.
They're linked to your vocabulary and need to be memorized for each and every new word you learn. This is why oral Chinese is a kick in the balls compared to Japanese. If you say something second tone when it's actually fourth tone, your total meaning could be lost if the context isn't obvious. It doesn't matter how "clear" you can pronounce a tone or word if your tones are used incorrectly.
Many foreigners after the first 6-12 months get lazy with learning tones as they learn new vocabulary. Often this leads to bad habits that are almost impossible to fix after a few years.
11 months ago
Anonymous
The real fun starts when you put together full and complex sentences, now you suddenly have to switch tones rapidly and connect the words.
11 months ago
Anonymous
The real fun starts when you put together full and complex sentences, now you suddenly have to switch tones rapidly and connect the words.
you're basically repeating what I said. You can learn how to pronounce tones in a rigorous way, then as you talk to people and get used to that, you end up learning how to have the correct intonations. I don't get where i'm contradicted here. My point was that through rigorous application for two months, you could get at least get your tones clear. Which isn't hard and is worth doing because will at least be articulate.
Also many foreigners fall for the chink compliments about how "amazing" their Chinese is and think they're already fluent when their somewhere around intermediate. Actually you're probably not fluent, they're just being polite because you're studying their language.
All I can say is try applying for a few interpreting roles and see how fluent you really are. Suddenly when you're faced with an actual challenge as I gave you might realize you've got some time to go before you've obtained general fluency.
Honestly ? I've already had to prove in /int/ that i spoke french in a flawless french accent. They called my accent fake and gay.
I'm a white Parisian dude.
and if you think Chinese compliments mean something to me after all these years of living in taiwan, i mean come on man.
11 months ago
Anonymous
because tones are part of the word retard, so when you use the second instead of the fourth you're saying another word
it's like complaining you need to properly write words in English instead of randomly replacing a with e and that people don't understand you when you ESL worse than an Indian
tones aren't separate from the word, they are the word
11 months ago
Anonymous
I have a monotone voice, whenever I try to inflect it sounds awkward and forced. Should I just give up on ever learning Chinese? I'm learning Japanese right now for this very reason. That and I heard the pronunciation is very similar to Spanish, which I'm already fluent in.
11 months ago
Anonymous
If you want to learn Chinese you'll have to learn them, it's part of the language. It's like saying you don't want to learn conjugation since you suck at memorization.
11 months ago
Anonymous
>tones aren't that hard if you're not completely tone deaf and can understand the notion of pitch
well fuck
I studied Japanese for 1 year and happy I switched to Chinese. The grammar for Japanese is so difficult. Chinese tones are a bitch but I can understand Chinese much easier than I could for Japanese
The tones are the easiest part of Chinese lmao. There are only 4 tones you retard. English has tones too. Think about a surprise party when the person opens the door and everyone yells “surprise!” in a high tone. Then think about when someone pulls out a gun and says “surprise, bitch” in a falling tone. The word “surprise” has different connotations with different tones. Chinese is like that with every word.
I've been learning Mandarin for 3 months and I'd like to second this anon's desire for some opinions on the process
I've been anki-droning for an hour a day, doing listening practice on mandarinbean.com, collecting and practicing a couple useful sentences, and not much else.
Aside from reading novels, my goal with the language is almost mainly just to feel what it's like to have a new language in my head
Pimsleur has a good mandarin course. In addition to Anki I used the app Scripts (and its parent app Drops) to learn Hanzi.
Here’s a link to the best Anki deck for Mandarin.
>theyll apparently make me not understandable
this point is overrated. context is more important to understanding and if you are talking to a chinese speaker then the situation is likely obvious and while they may struggle to get a word and it might need a few attempts, you will make it through the conversation. you are not going to have deep personal conversations while you have shit chinese level, but using the wrong tone when you are trying to buy laundry detergent isn't going to make a huge difference.
It won't but if you don't get your habits straightened up quick you'll be annoying to listen to. Not getting your tone right is worse than having to listen to an indian dude who actively sucks at english. You'll get through it but you won't like the experience.
use hackingchinese to get your tones. i paid for a course after having lived in china for years and having studied chinese at chinese university and the hacking chinese course was still useful in getting tones and importantly tone pairs down pat.
a more useful technique than reading books may be finding a tv show with subtitles and writing and then reading the transcript of the subtitles, mimicking the speaker. you might want to look at Language Reactor app/extension if you want to do this.
they are 2 tools i found useful after i already had competence.
I've been learning Mandarin for 3 months and I'd like to second this anon's desire for some opinions on the process
I've been anki-droning for an hour a day, doing listening practice on mandarinbean.com, collecting and practicing a couple useful sentences, and not much else.
Aside from reading novels, my goal with the language is almost mainly just to feel what it's like to have a new language in my head
yeah the tones are the main thing keeping me form learning it. I cant graps them and if theyll apparently make me not understandable then whats the point
if your first language is english there is no easy or quick way to learn it. why do you think its rated as one of the hardest languages to learn? ive been at it for years and im still far from fluent.
I've been learning Mandarin for 3 months and I'd like to second this anon's desire for some opinions on the process
I've been anki-droning for an hour a day, doing listening practice on mandarinbean.com, collecting and practicing a couple useful sentences, and not much else.
Aside from reading novels, my goal with the language is almost mainly just to feel what it's like to have a new language in my head
Maybe try free Mandarin courses from Coursera? I took the first one (https://www.coursera.org/learn/learn-chinese) and I have a fundemental base now. They are not perfect obviously but Pekin University is a respected one and teacher isn't bad. You can also request a scholarship (they give it to everyone) to get its certificate. They have several lectures on Mandarin and Chinese characters. Also if you really want to go and enjoy Taiwan for yourself you might want to get a language scholarship too. I believe they call it Huayu Enrichment Scholarship. I don't know the details very much but its worth checking.
Honestly the fastest way would probably be college level classes, otherwise the usual Anki grind plus tone and grammar practice I suppose. I took Mandarin in my undergrad and I actually made really fast progress because I feared my professor and thus studied my ass off and got to practice the language quite a bit. Plus its fun seeing old Chinese women that are usually the instructors dab on literally everyone including Chinese people because they don't hold back. Fortunately she loved me as a student so I was never on the receiving end of that.
I've been learning Mandarin for 3 months and I'd like to second this anon's desire for some opinions on the process
I've been anki-droning for an hour a day, doing listening practice on mandarinbean.com, collecting and practicing a couple useful sentences, and not much else.
Aside from reading novels, my goal with the language is almost mainly just to feel what it's like to have a new language in my head
Ok so, aside from the blog post i've posted here (teachyourselfmandarin), mandarin is something that needs to be spoken. You need to talk mandarin, and you need to do it with someone that will be very demanding when it comes to your tone, and will be ok with speaking in a slow articulate way for you.
Your best bet is to get a good mic, and go to preply and take courses, but don't focus on HSK preparation yet. Just have some fun discussing things in chinese, and tell your teacher to keep it in pinyin for a while. The issue with "real" courses is that they suck at this, making you spend hours writing chinese characters so you can recognize them when really, that should be left for when you have a satisfying mastery of oral chinese.
Learning chinese through anki and all that stuff is fine and dandy but if you can't speak it you'll suck. This is something that is best reserved for people who currently live in china/taiwan, because they're bathing in a sinophone environment and need to improve their vocab. Three months in, you're probably not even there yet.
tbh you don't even need to know how to write it or even read it for now. You need to speak it. the Assimil books are great with that because they precisely focus on grammar and vocab while doing it in pinyin for at least most of the first volume.
Also, don't worry about homophones. Chinese is extremely context heavy. If you're articulate, words with even the same tone can be understood provided your sentence is well constructed and inambiguous.
Once you 're done with that, that you know how to pronounce words and tones correctly and be able to conduct a basic conversation, you can start having fun with radicals, and anki shit. If you don't do it this way, you'll give up, because as long as you're not there, it's pretty much worthless and extremely frustrating, since character memorization is an extremely tedious and slow process while oral chinese is pretty fucking easy.
Dude, I want to read Chinese, not speak it. It's pointless so say >just learn to speak first when I have zero interest in doing so and am only interested in the characters.
Porbably gonna get a lot of hate for this but...don't bother. Really.
I have spent years studying mandarin and I consider it to be a big mistake. I am fluent-ish and have lived in China and studied at Peking U.
To be able to use it for work you will need years of immersive and intesnive study. Even then, most fail.
I planned to live and work there as well..after how they handled covid and treat foreigners I won't even consider it anymore.
Seriously, learn a language spoken in a country you can actually travel to and that doesnt bolt people into aparments and round up pets in bags to burn them. Take 1/10th of the time and learn any other language.
I have a few close Chinese friends but in general as poeple the Chinese are very materialistic, greedy, cold hearted, racist, and uneducated.
Not him but having fucked around in Asia for many years it is quite useful. Definitely the third most useful language here after 1. the local language and 2.english. Lots of locals here now can speak or are learning Chinese. Also the Chinese diaspora can be quite helpful and tightnit. For example, when I arrived at a small Korean city I had to find an apartment. I went to the one with the sign "我们欢迎同胞“ ("we welcome our compatriots" which is a phrase Chinese abroad use to welcome other Chinese into their business) because there was not a realtor in sight that had a sign saying they could speak English. Later on I would go to the Chinese driving school, the chinese hair salon and the Chinese supermarkets cause I couldn't speak a word of Korean. Similar story when I was in Thailand and Vietnam.
Only place I found the language quite useless was in Latin America where there is (for some odd reason) practically zero Chinese influence there. The Chinese you do find will be immigrants who came 100 years ago and speak a weird local Guangdong village language.
1. He heavily implied he was going to Taiwan, not mainland China
2. You sound incredibly butthurt
3. You will need years of immersive and intensive study for practically ANY language. For me personally it took two years (one of intensive study and one year of casual study). I'm currently learning Japanese and it's way harder than Chinese.
Your Chinese must be garbage. Lived there and I found the people to be incredibly friendly and honest. Quite uncooth but I'll take uncoot and friendly over extremely polite and incredibly unfriendly South Koreans or Canadians. Chinese are similar to Vietnamese in that regard but I find Vietnamese more friendly (and also more uncouth).
>I have a few close Chinese friends but in general as poeple the Chinese are very materialistic, greedy, cold hearted, racist, and uneducated.
No offence but you sound like a retarded, immature sperg.
What he said is 100% accurate I also wasted, 6/7 years learning Chinese and lived in Shanghai for 6m or so. What a fkn waste of time. And as that guy said its legit hard study to learn it, which could be put to 100 things more useful. Fuck China and Fuck Chinese, worst mistake of my life and I learned to HSK 6 .
Any of u retards that actually want to learn it:
italki find the cheapest tutor u can and just talk shit with her.
Anki, just smash out words in this.
That's all I never touched a stupid boring text book in my life.
It's so funny that mutts think China is some third-world shithole, when in reality China is clean, safe, and getting very rich. Outside of homelessness, moron worship, and druggies, what is the USA better at?
China is irrelevant. Sure, it's bigger and more diverse, but everything beyond the scope of your first tier city will be a bitch to deal with. Our point in these threads aren't necessarily to just gawk at Taiwan and hate on China, but on realistically living or visiting the place.
China was a bitch to live in because you have little to literally no chance to get a PR even if I get married with a local, food safety and regulation have been proven to be thoroughly unreliable, and the Chinese government in general has proven that they were anti-immigration, and yes, anything that is 20 mile away from at least a 2nd tier city is third world, from the roads, to the people, to even the safety. I say was, because you can't even get in. So who gives a flying fuck about China being better than the US if you can't fucking join them ? Why would that matter ?
On the other hand, Taiwan welcomes you with its arms open, you get a shot at a PR after 5 years (or if you get married), they have a Gold Card scheme for qualified immigrants, the tap water isn't going to turn you into a gay frog, the food (even street food, never got sick in 4 years of gorging myself with the stuff) is all safe for consumption, and if there is a kid snatcher in the area (which there isn't, because taipei is among the safest cities in the world), the govt doesn't censor the story to pretend everything's all right and good.
I mean you can keep sucking Chinese cock and continue this debate but they don't give a flying fuck about you and they don't like you. So why side with them ? What's the point ? Why the endless comparisons with fucking China in a Taiwanese city thread ?
>So who gives a flying fuck about China being better than the US if you can't fucking join them ? Why would that matter ?
Because my cucked country is turning into a globohomo immigrant shithole due to your zog controlled mutt country. China isn't influencing my country to accept immigrants, China isn't shoving BLM, LGBT, feminism and diversity down my country's throat. Is China anti-immigrant? Great. I hope it stays that way and in 100 years China will stay as China. Compared to a shithole like France or Sweden that will turn into Somalia in 50 years. That is why I side with China and want my country to side with China. It isn't China that is flying the BLM and pride flag at their embassy in my country, your retarded country and it's globohomo vassal states are. in my country I am already seeing most of the adverts having 1/5th black people despite them being something like 0.5% of the population. A lot of the "human rights organizations" that encourage globohomo behavior are ~~*coincidentally*~~ linked to the US. Must just be a coincidence though, I'm sure. If you want to continue sucking mutt cock go ahead. Enjoy having your children transitioning, brainwashed into hating their race/gender and your daughters getting BLACKED. You brought this world onto yourself and only have yourself to blame. This is why I support China.
Why should I care that your country is crap again ? lol
I'm having the time of my life in taiwan. Maybe you would too. If you're terrified of catching the gay because you saw one dude with lip gloss, go to Singapore. Like all the 4chanfags roaming in this board, you sound like you have a very sad life and are constantly preoccupied about your future. Why not do something about it by getting the fuck out rather than shitposting non-stop on threads that do not give a fuck about you ?
I mean, the only reason why i singled you out of all posts is because you're a guaranteed bump.
I'm not asking if that matters for them, you fucking idiot, it's whether it would matter to YOU. There is nothing in what they do that would better your outcome in life. Nothing you have described would somehow make your kids less likely want to transition than mine. Ironically, by being a fucking cucked retard who thinks some abstract idea of the state is worth more than the betterment of your life ad your family, you've doomed them and yourself. This is why the only meaningful impact you fuckers have is school shootings
They both are shitholes. However China (outside of first tier cities) I expect to be a shithole as it's still developing. Taiwan however still manages to be a shithole despite being first world. Weird as fuck .
They both are shitholes. However China (outside of first tier cities) I expect to be a shithole as it's still developing. Taiwan however still manages to be a shithole despite being first world. Weird as fuck .
the east side and the rural villages are vietnam tier. i would put taipei and kaohsiung as the equivalent of chinese tier 2 cities. i've never been to taoyuan so have no idea how that compares to anything.
Taipei isn't cheap, a decent studio in Taipei is gonna cost you like 20,000-22,000 a month without electric bills.
Average TEFL fags wages are like 50-55k a month. Taiwan is cheap when you leave Taipei and go somewhere like Taichung, then that 55k you're only gonna be paying 12k for housing.
>decent and cheap
We don't know what you definition of decent and cheap is. Decent and cheap for me means
NTD below >at least 10坪 >a single room and my own kitchen and bathroom plus toilet >supermarket and gym one or two blocks away >quiet neighborhood, not in front of a large road >MRT station less than 10 minutes away >close to my office
This is easily doable anywhere in Taipei, even in Da'an.
If you want a large space or just want something cheaper, your only option is to cross the river and live in New Taipei City. Yonghe, Banqiao, Sanchong, Xindian, Shilin.
If you can communicate in Chinese, another option to stay inside Taipei is to find a 頂樓加蓋. These are the rooms you see on rooftops and they are technically illegal. You can't put this on your address (you'll be using the top floor address), but everyone does this and no one really cares. Much cheaper than a proper apartment unit, but it comes with its own issues.
In what world do you think you can get your own place in Taipei for 20k lmao. Maybe gaoxiong but if you want something in central Taipei you're gonna need to double that number minimum
Anon most of those are shared apartments, the one that isn't is a top floor dinglou.
You shouldn't rent a dinglou because the roof is a thin scrap of sheet metal with plasterboard and your AC bill is going to push that to 18k rent to 20k+ in the summer as it leaks in hot air. You'll be living in a literal furnace. They're also illegal and unsafe to live in. Wet season their prone to leaks from typhoon rain and roaches.
If that's what you honestly think then you either lack the brain cells necessary to perform a simple search or you're talking out of your ass and parroting whatever you've seen online.
please shut the fuck up, no taiwanese is paying $650 a month for rent
you can get an okay furnished place for $400 a month, stop fucking trolling, the country is poor as shit
>no taiwanese is paying $650 a month for rent
This is another gross exaggeration similar to the other guy saying 20000 NTD is impossible in the middle of Taipei.
t. lived in Taipei in two 3 year stints plus another year's worth of visits.
12 months ago
Anonymous
20k is the starting price for an actual apartment, you know a basic regular place with a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, washing machine, room for an actual table and chairs. A place to dry clothes.
When I say a decent apartment I don't mean the shit your posting with a toilet, sink and bed within one metre of each other.
11 months ago
Anonymous
Keep moving goal posts. The guy asked for a decent and cheap apartment within Taipei and I provided my own definition of decent and cheap. >don't know how to search for an apartment >can't read
Yeah I guess the problem is that you're dyslexic.
ok so disregard all the retards and consider the following redpill and picrel.
the problem with the taiwanese downtown is that it spans half the fucking city with many nevralgic centers (Dongmen, Ximen, 101, Technology Building, Main Station, Digital Plaza around Songjiang Nanjing etc.). So as long as you're within the city limits (even if you're not, you're never THAT far), It'll take you as much time to walk to the station than to get to your station of choice. I highly suggest living near the green line (so, the green zone) because that practically gets you anywhere and is well connected to the red Line (which basically covers the more expensive Da'an area). You could also consider living up north where the black area is. This is where a lot of older expats live, but i don't know much about it besides Yuanshan with its Maji Square (and its Triangle)
You want cheap but nice addresses, look around Wanshan and Zhongzheng District. If that's too much, you can still settle for something around Xindian without missing out on the rest of Taipei since it's not that far. Also, the 648 bus basically goes from the deeper end of xindian all the way to City Hall, so even if you're a cheap hack you can make do with that. Because yes, knowing how the buses work in Taipei will save you a *lot* of money.
>Zhongxiao Xinsheng
every "Zhongxiao X" is one of the more bougie part of Taipei, along with 101. The SOGO at Fuxing sets the tone perfectly, filled with Fendi and Gucci and Louis Vuitton crap.
So my explanations were pertaining to long terrm accomodation. For a short term stay, Ximen would be my personal choice if you truly want to enjoy Taipei in all its glory. Great surroundings, great place to be at, a nice feeling. Second place would be Dongmen for the same reason, but Ximen being on the blue Line gets you to Taipei City Hall/101 area way faster. but tbh anything i've circled goes, except the green part below gongguan which is a tad far imho, as well as Jiantan on the red line.
Also a lot of hotels are under 50 but still of great quality, so look for those.
I lived there. In urban developed/residential area there's no mosquito problem. Obviously if you go to Fort Canning park at dusk you will get attacked by biting insects.
I know this is a fucking annoying question but is there anything you highly recommend doing which is overlooked by tourists (or not)? I'll be there in a few days
Not an annoying question at all. >Taipei
Hike the south mountain area accessed through Xiangshan. See some folksy temples. Go to the highest lookout point with some drinks/snacks and watch the city turn to dusk. Go to Raohe market after.
Taoyuan city centre Tonlin Plaza is secretly based for picking up easy local girls.
Ximending is sovlless. Don't stay there.
If you have the time, spend a night at a hot spring resort near the city.
11 months ago
Anonymous
>Ximending is sovlless. Don't stay there.
I disagree. Hotels there are relatively cheap, and the MRT station drops you pretty much everywhere interesting, unless you need the red line, in which case you're one stop away from Main Station. Also, Ximen itself is very convenient due to the amount of stores that aren't that expensive.
I've been learning Mandarin for 3 months and I'd like to second this anon's desire for some opinions on the process
I've been anki-droning for an hour a day, doing listening practice on mandarinbean.com, collecting and practicing a couple useful sentences, and not much else.
Aside from reading novels, my goal with the language is almost mainly just to feel what it's like to have a new language in my head
anyone recommend ways to learn mandarin? i wanna go really bad i have a taiwanese buddy who lives there and he is turbo based
https://teachyourselfmandarin.wordpress.com/
Follow this. This is the best way, but it's also the hardest way.
11 months ago
Anonymous
Come to linkou use line to hook up women in motel
11 months ago
Anonymous
>use line to hook up women in motel
you mean the "people nearby" feature in line? Does it have anything other than fakes and scammers there?
11 months ago
Anonymous
>Taoyuan city centre Tonlin Plaza is secretly based for picking up easy local girls
Tell us more about this, anon.
11 months ago
Anonymous
Several modern department store shopping malls next to Taoyuan station that's a 45 minute ride from downtown Taipei. Taoyuan residents who commute to Taipei for work often end their evenings at Tonlin area (it is downtown Taoyuan) and Taoyuan people are less used to foreign tourist trash. Plenty of hourly hotels nearby. You can leverage it in your favor and easily approach women who relaxing after a long week of work or pick up some drunk locals who are horny and want to relieve themselves with some foreign no-strings attached cock. Did it myself several times.
What part of Taipei would be its equivalent to the Upper East Side or Upper West Side in Manhattan? Rich, upscale, more quiet, but lots of shopping and restaurants.
Comments on this post
https://www.traveltaiwanduringcovid19.com/538/home-quarantine-policy/
and
https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/xs51qa/comment/iryzy3r/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Individiual hotels are able to say whatever they want of course, but there's no legal requirement to stay at the same hotel, and nobody checks your accom on entry
It's essentially China just 20 years in the past. Less developed, less internet censorship, less competent government, etc. In 15 years it will be where China is today. They are already trying to implement the Chinese firewall there.
You could live on the same amount of money without any real issues. with 400 bucks you can find a place with a roommate, and with 600 bucks you could get something alone somewhere in the city. Electricity/water may not come too cheap if you're an AC enjoyer but it shouldn't go above 100$ if you're not terminally retarded. Food isn't 'as cheap as bangkok but you should have no problem with 300 bucks. The rest can go into savings, clothes or booze.
Does anyone like brutal but homeland security national revolution army show?
u get t65k2 with bayonet and clothes if u will to act but bad for street reputation
I'm in Japan and don't like it much so yeah there are probably better whores there and they are less racist. I hope China opens. I would marry a chinese hooker.
>pure blooded europeans
Is as retarded as saying "pure blooded asians".
Europe is a gigantic region containing a shit ton of ethnicities that melded and mixed throughout history. A spaniard has nothing to do with a swede and same with anglos and greeks. Europe is a giant melting pot of rape. >Taiwan has more pure chinese
I love Taiwan and I am seriously tired of all the larpers who come in with their retarded theories and no care about basic history. You're fitting round pegs in square holes here.
Taiwan was heavily involved with the japs, with many taiwanese having japanese ancestry (my ex-gf did, and it shows). Add to that the mainlanders that came with CKS, and the guys from Fujian, the Hakka, and the aboriginals.
Finally, the Han racemixing was happening for centuries now. It's done. Hans are pretty much the same all over the place with only slight differences.
>Taiwan has more pure Chinese
I'm not sure if your really retarded or a bot. Taiwan was colonized for 100 years by the Japanese, invaded by Fuzhounese immigrants and has an Austronesian moron population that is essentially just Filipinos. There is also the 50 extra years of being westernized that has made them MUCH more susceptible to interracial marriages. In short, you're an idiot.
I visited Taiwan in 2019 for a couple of weeks. Taipei has a feel to it that Seoul and Tokyo don't get close to approaching.
If the food was as good as in Japan, I would recommend it overall. For everything else non-weeb, it is a definite improvement.
Even the tourist traps have a real charm to them. But the best time I had was on the east coast, where I ended up hitchhiking a lot. Most of the people who picked me up had never done it before, so I had some good chats with the locals, in extremely broken english.
I would spend some time going all over the island. Visiting small towns, and heading inland (like up the Taroko Gorge).
In two weeks I am going to visit taiwan for a week.
I am comfortable solo travelling but have never done anything like hitchhiking which seems very daunting. i am very very introverted but speak B1 mandarin and practicing/immersing is a major motivator for the trip
I had never hitchhiked before, don't speak any mandarin, and I'm introverted. But after 3 weeks of travelling total, I needed to speak to someone.
What's English proficiency like among 18-30 year olds in Taipei?
I wanna make frens with the locals but I don't think I have the mental capacity to get a hold on Mandarin before I go over there
Pretty shit. The only conversations I was able to have were with mormon missionaries. I saw a few of them there.
The most useful thing I found was knowing enough kanji that I could sort of read menus and signs. But in terms of speaking, I couldn't even say yes or no.
Still I managed to get someone to arrange a pretty dodgy local taxi guy to get me somewhere else. Without any common languages.
Throughout the whole trip, I was impressed with just how friendly everyone was.
Just start grinding Anki decks and you will learn it. A small amount goes a long way.
Yeah imma start grinding
What's the social life like over there? I'm a former shutin and I wanna make up for my wasted youth experiences, are there many opportunities to make friends?
11 months ago
Anonymous
Former introvert. You instantly become a chad if you are from a western country because everyone wants to talk to you. Just today I was walking to work and a 50 year old woman stopped me to take my picture.
11 months ago
Anonymous
Are you getting laid there? How hard is it if you're a decent looking white guy?
11 months ago
Anonymous
>Just today I was walking to work and a 50 year old woman stopped me to take my picture.
I thought this behavior is typical in places that have never seen foreigners of a different race in person. Even though Taiwan is fairly small, are there really still towns or cities in Taiwan like that?
11 months ago
Anonymous
In the city of Miaoli where I live (pop 90,000) 8 whites live in the city. So we aren't unseen but probably the first time they saw one in a month or 2. They are very curious people
10 months ago
Anonymous
>They are very curious people
Why doesn't that happen in japan outside of maybe creepshotting? Surely there are some towns that barely see foreigners. Or maybe I'm wrong.
I met some mormons too in Taichung, I was riding my youbike and we're stopped at a red light and took the opportunity to talk to me.
They are really everywhere! Like Jehovah's witnesses!
What's English proficiency like among 18-30 year olds in Taipei?
I wanna make frens with the locals but I don't think I have the mental capacity to get a hold on Mandarin before I go over there
Been texting damsels the past couple of days and saving all of their useful sentences
Just spent 2 hours sitting on my bathroom floor grinding tones.
Now awaiting a call with a native speaker who hopefully isnt too nice to not tell me that they're all shit
You don't need any of that lol. Just practice sentences and phrases. You'll learn the melodies of sentences and you won't have to think about each word/tone because it will be a string of sounds. Like in English we say "I'm going to go to the car" as "I'mmonnagohduthecar" without thinking about the component words
How the fuck do you guys deal with the heat? This country is so fucking hot and humid I feel like I wake up in an oven every day and struggle to get to sleep every night.
Unless you're deaf, I can't picture a scenario where you would
(AND COULD) only need to read chinese and not speak it unless you're into ancient chinese literature. In which case you'd be taking a specialized course that would require you to understand oral chinese.
You could do it in your own autistic way, but nobody fucking does that so good luck
I only care about learning Chinese to read online novels
You definitely can. It's just retarded is all. You'd have to apply chinese grammar to english words, which would sound and function extremely awkwardly.
A language is a package deal. Depriving yourself of your hearing memory and ability will slow down the learning process considerably.
I mean sure, the idea of focusing on the oral aspect of it is definitely something i'd recommend to someone who, say, is planning to go there and where a good drive of oral chinese is far more important than written, but plain ignoring the hearing and listening aspect would deprive you from one more way for your brain to memorize and associate words with characters. And for someone willing to go as far as being able to read a novel without looking constantly at a dictionary, you're looking at something by the looks of HSK5. That's 4 years of regular study of Mandarin for you. More if you're not practicing regularly, less if you go to China/Taiwan, so why even bother ?
Oh, and that's only for modern chinese lit. Heavens forbid you try the ancient ones even the locals have trouble with.
You're seriously fucking retarded if you think Taiwan is cheap Japan. Taiwan is a slightly cleaner mainland China, but China nonetheless.
I was in Tokyo and Taipei last week for business. The thing about Taiwan is that they are really good at copying the aesthetic of Japan, but beyond the thin veneer, shit is still Chinese as fuck.
The night markets are still trashy and dirty. The streets are dirty like China. Ohhh but they look just like Shibuya in pictures. Nope. Look a little closer and you'll notice how dirty everything is.
Taiwan is not Japan. It doesn't have the money and the culture that Japan has. It's moving up, I'll give it that. It's a first world country these days, but at the bottom of the first world list.
>Dirty
Older, sure, but definitely not dirty. people throw their trash at home or keep it with them.
Night markets get greasy (it's fucking food cooked in the open, no shit), but it's not dirty.
>You're seriously fucking retarded if you think Taiwan is cheap Japan.
I don't get where you can't possibly think that. Even the better parts of China look more like Japan than any other place in the world, aside from maybe Korea and, well, Taiwan. You haven't been to Tokyo nor Taipei nor do you have a fucking business. You're a larper and you're making shit up, or you're extrapolating from what you may have seen in SEA.
>and the culture that Japan has
japan's culture at this point is being a shut in at your parent's place and killing yourself in a forest lol don't get me wrong it's better than north america but come on, it's a mid nation at this point for niche outsiders.
>So how do KTVs work in Taiwan?
Legitimate KTVs? Go in, ask for a room, done. Call/book if it's fri/sat/sun, they are almost always fully booked on those days.
"KTVs"? Go in, pick a girl, go to your room.
>Is it easy to get local girls to go to one with you?
As in a random woman who just left her 996 office job? Someone you met through dating apps?
Can you pull? Are you attractive? Yes? No? There's your answer. What kind of answer are you expecting for such a question?
Just wondering how common those "KTV"s are and if they are accessible to foreigners. I'm guessing if they exist they're overpriced and have low quality girls.
Not him but no, the prostitutes are not worth it since it's easy to pull. Or go with friends. And there are ktvs everywhere. Literally google map it or go to partyworld in ximen.
If you really want to ruin yourself, go to Linsen north road. There you have ktv and ktv hostesses, but it's not cheap. Fucking degenerate.
It depends on the KTV. The cheap ones will have used up 30/40 year olds and the expensive ones will have model like 20 years old. You can choose the one you want. It's expensive for poorfags but if youre a richfag go for it.
Learning a language on an app is a meme. Get an actual textbook, take classes on italki or take online classes on YouTube.
Avoid Duolingo like the plague. it's fucking garbage for asian languages.
Bought a plane ticket to Taipei. It will be my first time in Asia and first solo travel. I've got a remote job and recently broke up with my girlfriend. It's going to be lonely, but what the heck, why not? Any tips to make the most of my stay anons? I could stay for up to three months.
>Thread on Taiwan >Turns into deranged trumptards and glowmorons making up stories trying to smear China, a country they've never been to (because that would require leaving mommy's basement)
I want 4chan to be shut down so bad. Turned the entire site into a shitpit of shills, reddit retards and underaged children
Anki for the basics.
You can find lots of Chinese language content on youtube but only written in Chinese (Youtube censors and suppresses Chinese content)
There are tons of visual novels that you can find on steam in chinese as well once your vocabulary base is good enough.
HSK 1 Standard Course by Jiang Liping and then the rest of the course. all in pdf form. you can find them online, they were all on z-library but that is now gone.
you get 4 spit in a bottle tests which no one checks on. if you are positive within 7 days of arriving you are meant to isolate. masks required everywhere.
>https://disp.cc/b/Gossiping/aq6E >They already came, for some reason 80% white men I met in Taiwan have strong Beta/loser energy and are English Teachers. The 20% who isn't teachers are normals in tech or biz.
It's more of a 60/40 split than a 20/80. You just hang out with the shittier crowds. Most people do tech, biz, or have their own thing going on that isn't teaching. It's just that they're not from the anglo world and do not really give a fuck about interacting with you in general. They'd rather just do their thing with their people or focus on their work and family. They don't give a fuck about expat forums, they don't give a fuck about you or me, and the only expats they talk to are the ones they came with, or the guys from their block and that's it. A lot of them are around the northern parts of taipei, as well as xindian and yonghe. By the way, to the people reading this, these are the people you should know about if you're planning something long term. Not your TEFL retard who's just having the time of his life and will leave in 2 years anyway.
As for the retard from ptt, they come here every year. And every year, they get called out and some are actually lynched. I remember one of these retard got doxxed and people were waiting at the hotel where he stayed to confront him and he basically spent the rest of his trip hiding like a bitch lmao.
>Taipei is homo'd because some retards meme'd a puppet as a president. I'm going to meme the other parties to take out Tsai.
There's nothing homo about Taiwan, most of its people are very conservative. The gay marriage thing is a red herring, same for a couple of crappy thing they try to pass. The KMT will literally never pass so long as they don't have a platform that isn't about openly sucking PRC cock and progressively get isolated.
The rest of what you said is retarded and now I regret answering you.
>xindian and yonghe
any good neighbourhoods/ares around mrt stations to check out in those districts? i'd only ever been to banqiao in new taipei and spend all my time in taipei city on the short times i was there.
I'm 24 and just got a Chinese gf after a series of misguided relationships and careless cooming. This girl is incredibly sweet, innocent, frugal, open minded, and responsible, but something feels like it's missing... Maybe it's because she's not dramatic, mentally ill, badass, has asian zoomer tier housekeeping skills, and/or is not overly confident... Despite only being 24, I've decided to continue with it and not sabotage my own potential happiness. Happiness from cooming was becoming increasingly diminished, being adulterous was getting difficult and pathetic, and while mentally ill women make life feel kino they are way too stressful after the honeymoon phase. My gf doesn't speak fluent English but I hope she improves over time. I am learning mandarin because why wouldn't I in this situation? My brain is finally maturing
What is your experience with stable, monogamous relationships?
I'm 24 and just got a Chinese gf after a series of misguided relationships and careless cooming. This girl is incredibly sweet, innocent, frugal, open minded, and responsible, but something feels like it's missing... Maybe it's because she's not dramatic, mentally ill, badass, has asian zoomer tier housekeeping skills, and/or is not overly confident... Despite only being 24, I've decided to continue with it and not sabotage my own potential happiness. Happiness from cooming was becoming increasingly diminished, being adulterous was getting difficult and pathetic, and while mentally ill women make life feel kino they are way too stressful after the honeymoon phase. My gf doesn't speak fluent English but I hope she improves over time. I am learning mandarin because why wouldn't I in this situation? My brain is finally maturing
I'm gonna continue writing because maybe this will resonate with some of you out there, and I do not want to attend therapy just so some Stacy with a graduate degree can know all of my secrets including inflicted and self inflicted traumas. It's a long and ugly list.
I saw a mom, dad and kid at the store last week. The mom was the innocent but very dumb and oblivious type of person. She was shopping for boots and the dad asked her why she needed them. "Well, for walking around and walking in the park". The dad expressed some grimace but said alright. Meanwhile, the kid was sitting on the floor shouting some incomprehensible words. After some time, the dad was sitting down, bend over with palms over his face mutter "we're gonna be here forever". He explained to her it was 5pm on a Friday after work and that he didn't want to be there. I knew his life was hellish because he chose some geriatric woman to mother his child. It was another reminder to choose a partner carefully
We all just want the best for ourselves. It's a hard balance to strike. Does she make enough money to make me not feel like wish granting services? Is she going to still be my looksmatch at 40? Is she going to be totally useless at cooking and housekeeping forcing me redo half assed attempts. For some reason, teaching women how to open tin cans, open blinds, put on bed sheets, and write coherent paragraphs is something I continue to do with partners I find. It confuses the hell out of me - which straw ought to snap the fuck out of the camels back? Is having a child wife okay is she's always learning what you teach her?
These probably aren't questions well adjusted men face because they just choose an okay-looking normie but if anyone has remarks, they'd be interesting to hear
I'll be in Taiwan for a couple of weeks in December. Recommendations on what to do in southern Taiwan?
After checking out Taipei and Jioufen, I'm thinking of heading south to Hualien and doing the Zhuilu Old Trail. I also want to catch the train up to Alishan, but don't know where else to visit on the way there. Is Sun Moon Lake worth a day trip?
And then I don't really have anything else planned. Not even sure it's worth heading all the way to Kenting, given it'll be winter...
When they first carved out the trail from the cliff side it was only 30cms wide! At least there's ropes along the cliff now.
I remember cycling from Taidong to Hualien, easy if you rent a bike. The east coast of Taiwan has really nice nature.
Sun Moon Lake is touristy but worth it if you get a bike for the day.
Yilan is close to Taipei and it's nice can be visited as a day trip
Yeah, I'm still undecided if I'll head south via the west or east coast, but if it's the latter I'll definitely check out Yilan. I heard the hot springs are good there.
Jiufen is overrated and expensive. It's very crowded and it only looks good by night, and then you'll get bored pretty quickly. If you have some time, Yilan and the rice fields surrounding it are an absolute sight to behold since there is no rice and it's a basically a giant mirror made of water. I went to a hotel there with a bath that is a giant square hole. Very comfy. the city itself gives off third world country vibes but it's still pretty clean and the food is nice.
Also, keelung is worth going to from taipei, just take the bus by 6 at taipei city hall and go back with the last line (or go by train from main station).
As for the south, i guess kenting and tainan worth a shot. But i quite frankly prefer the north of taiwan, except in summer.
Thanks for the heads up. Leaning towards heading through Yilan for sure now. Will look into Keelung as well. What were your favourite things to do there?
Yeah, I might skip the south as well if I can't fit in everything else I wanna do in the north as I only have 2 weeks to play with.
I remember cycling from Taidong to Hualien, easy if you rent a bike. The east coast of Taiwan has really nice nature.
Sun Moon Lake is touristy but worth it if you get a bike for the day.
Yilan is close to Taipei and it's nice can be visited as a day trip
Jiufen is overrated and expensive. It's very crowded and it only looks good by night, and then you'll get bored pretty quickly. If you have some time, Yilan and the rice fields surrounding it are an absolute sight to behold since there is no rice and it's a basically a giant mirror made of water. I went to a hotel there with a bath that is a giant square hole. Very comfy. the city itself gives off third world country vibes but it's still pretty clean and the food is nice.
Also, keelung is worth going to from taipei, just take the bus by 6 at taipei city hall and go back with the last line (or go by train from main station).
As for the south, i guess kenting and tainan worth a shot. But i quite frankly prefer the north of taiwan, except in summer.
Taoyuan is not interesting at all. Taipei and Kaohsiung are the only cities worth getting accomodation for more than a day.
The rest you can get to by train quickly from either of these cities. Possibly, if cities aren't your thing and you love hiking, give Yilan and Hualien a shot. Hualien is the most advertised but Yilan has a really cool feel to it. especially the rice field area
Jesus christ, 4 nights ? Two would've been more than enough. Once you do the nightmarket taichung doesnt have much to show. Can't even go to the beach since it's winter.
I fell for the slowtravel meme and will be working remotely. Also, a cutie who lives there wants to show me around. Hotel prices are better in Taichung than Taipei also.
What's good in Kaohsiung?
Generally speaking, what are some places in Taiwan you'd recommend to a sinophile? If I visit Taiwan I really wanna feel like I'm visiting China.
Duuuude you gotta get that shit you can get delivered where you pick a bunch of meats and veggies and even fruit and candy and they batter it and deep fry it like tempura and put it in a paper bag and you eat it with a big toothpick. That shit is the best drunk food ever. Forget what it's called but some slut I picked up suggested it when I was drunk and said I was tired of eating healthy shit
I'd be up for a beer. I'm arriving on Friday, but I'll most likely be jet-lagged. I've shared my email earlier in the thread. What's your experience like so far?
So what can I see there?
It is very intriguing to see it before the chinese will btfo the whole stuff, and I found some great tickets and accomodiation for a good price, but when I google what to see I get average shit
Ah yes, definitely go to thailand. It's not like eye surgery is something risky that might ruin your life if you cut corners when it comes to it. And yes, i know about lasik surgery and how "safe" it is.
Seriously though, while taiwan has relatively good and modern healthcare sometimes it feels fucking archaic. If you don't know the doctor and doesnt come recommended, avoid at all costs.
I can't tell if youre being sarcastic or not about Thailand. Lots of people go there for medical tourism (most famously ladyboys, but also lasik). I don't know if it's any better or worse than Taiwan for that stuff. I just assume from stereotypes that the northern Asian types in Taiwan would be better doctors than the jungle Asians in Thailand.
The general rule when it comes to high risk surgeries is to get whoever has the most experience in this. Another factor to consider is the presence of some kind of standard or regulating body that would make sure the practice isn't trying to fuck you over. If you have both, then go ahead, even if it's in Ghana.
I'm being sarcastic in the sense that you're trying to get something risky at a cheap price. Trannies go to thailand not for the cheap price but for the ridiculous experience the surgeons have in there. fake tits and boob removal is something they are adept at.
besides, Lasik in thailand has similar prices as in the US, look it up. I think i'd rather do it in a country where the surgeon has the additional incentive of not wanting to be sued for a botched job
calling it "high risk" is an exaggeration. Yeah it's not 100% safe, but no surgery is. It's not like I'm looking for open-heart surgery or something. They basically just strap you in and push a button on the machine. >besides, Lasik in thailand has similar prices as in the US, look it up
roughly half the price as the US from what I'm seeing ($3000 in Thailand vs $6000 in US). Taiwan is like that too. India would be cheaper. Of course the price varies massively depending on what procedure you get and whether they're quoting you the real price or some scam where they hit you with extra fees at the end.
I wouldn't go to Taiwan for LASIK, Anon. When I was living there, their medical facilities were decent for acute visits (colds, flus, things of that nature) but it always takes forever and is overwhelmed with every old fuck with an ache and pain. I'm fairly certain the old-timers would go check-in for a made-up illness/injury so that they could sit in the air-conditioned waiting room, I shit you not. Oh, and the credentials of the doctors there are questionable at best.
This Anon is also correct:
Ah yes, definitely go to thailand. It's not like eye surgery is something risky that might ruin your life if you cut corners when it comes to it. And yes, i know about lasik surgery and how "safe" it is.
Seriously though, while taiwan has relatively good and modern healthcare sometimes it feels fucking archaic. If you don't know the doctor and doesnt come recommended, avoid at all costs.
Medicine in taiwan is ridiculous to say the least. They go there for literally anything and everything and the doctor prescribes indecent and ludicrous amount of everytthing and anything you want except painkillers. They giveaway benzos like it's fucking candy, and antibiotics are basically otc and they prescribe them at every turn as if you were a caged chicken.
Seriously, my ex gf went to the doctor and had fucking antibiotics given to her for her fucking flu. Got a burn ? Here's an antibiotic cream. Acne ? Have some fucidin.
You don't want to deal with doctors in Asia in general. If it's not ridiculously dogmatic and ideologically driven like TCM, they just don't give a fuck about you.
As a Taiwanese-American who has not been to the country for 25 years, how should I expect a trip to go if my Japanese waifu wants one? My Taiwanese relatives love her and actually talk to her in Japanese better than I do...
I'm 30 now, has Taiwan developed massively over the past 25 years?
yes. It went from Mexico tier to near Japan tier
Please don't talk too much about it. The last thing we need is the loser bunch of sighsee to come in and fuck the place up. Let them believe it's a globohomo chud paradise of mask mandates or whatever they call that shit.
There's a fair bit of improvement from then, when the older expats talk about it. the subway MRT stations in taipei and kaohsiung, xinyi district in taipei, and the overall development of both rural and urban areas were significant in the last 30 years. It's technically "discount Japan" imho, but it also came into its own, the buildings aren't boring skyscrapers, the big buildings are only in the main streets, leaving the small lanes with small houses/restaurants/shops with a style reminiscent of what beijing hutongs used to look like.
pic related is an example of a classic lane in Taipei, one block away from the hustle and bustle of OP's pic. Makes for great night walks too
It's nice developed, public transportation like MRT, tramways or bullet train. Free WiFi everywhere and fun people.
>Makes for great night walks too
Yup and sometimes, while turning a corner, you come across picrel
>you come across picrel
i thought that looked familiar but many places could look like it. google says it is Taichung Yizhong Street Shopping District.
i stayed in a airbnb for a month in the block in the picture, going to the gym just up the road, got a haircut which took far too long at the barbers in that shopping precinct. the pictures make it look more interesting than it really is. there wasn't anything happening except for one or two saturdays in the whole month and the streets with chairs out were empty every night, as i was out every night i saw them at different times. it was the wrong end of the night market. the night market was much busier than that shopping precinct. the opposite end of the street is better because it is nearer the universities.
there was a good burger place nearby, Burger Joint 7.
I have been trying to go there for a couple of months but i am a non codemonkey ESL so my project is doomed isn't it?
Are you a native English or French speaker?
>*ESL
Oh now I feel stupid. You can get a decent job teaching French.
How is it currently with masks and stuff?
I'd like to visit in November after stopping through Vietnam, but am young, boosted, and lazy, and don't feel like wearing masks outside 24/7.
They have a fucking outdoor mask mandate. Chinks are retarded. Vietnam has no covid bullshit.
Hard pass.
> but am young, boosted, and lazy,
add retarded to the list, lad
>discount Japan
That’s an absolutely childlike retarded comparison topkek. You only think that because they are both Asian islands. Taiwan is nothing like Japan. Both wonderful countries but not similar at all
This anon is right. Taiwan is nothing like Japan, Taiwan is better. No fucking weebs there.
>talks about weeb island
>"No fucking weebs there"
but banter aside, the weebs there are some of the chillest weebs in all of Asia
It's because people forgot what a weaboo actually meant. Not everyone who enjoys japanese culture is a weeb.
Weaboo used to be about retards that adopted exaggerated anime mannerisms and used their shitty, subtitle based knowledge of japanese at every turn, and copying other, often outdated or/and non realistic aspects of japanese culture in an awkward fashion.
/trv/'s definition now shifted to being someone who is actually knowledgeable about Japan.
Taiwanese aren't so much weebs as they have a shared past with japan as a former colony and have way more in common with the japanese than mainlanders.
Taiwan has a lot to do with Japan. Taipei could easily be a smaller japanese city not unlike Sendai.
>Taiwan is nothing like Japan
https://mediakron.bc.edu/edges/uyghur-language/2019-midterm-projects/the-cultural-legacy-of-japanization-in-taiwan/a-taiwanese-engagement-ceremony-and-other-japanese-customs
>In 1983, my grandparents celebrated their 20-year wedding anniversary with a photoshoot capturing them in traditional Japanese dress
Taiwan was occupied by Japan for a while so a lot of the older gen speak japanese and the culture still is there despite japan losing its grip over the island. it's obviously more chinese (minus cultural revolution bullshit) but jap culture is there in the ways they would be within a past-occupied country
This is more a result of Taiwan-Japan relationship in the past decades than old colonial history.
0tx2rx
I'm going there in for the new year, and suggestions on places I should go see?
Any decent apps for fucking Taiwanese girls?
Bumble is barely active
fuck off pajeet
you have enough threads you already derailed
Can someone explain the pajeet meme
It's basically just that indian men behave in a lecherous way online (and also irl to an extent). Also "show bobs and vagene."
indian men are known for being creepy and way too forward sexually both on the internet and in real life. combine that with all their bullshit scams (see:
) and you start to see why no one likes them
I did really well with Tinder, just use that
Anyone in Taiwan right now who can report what its like during the 0+7 period?
3 (4) days in quarantine. The last 3 you can do whatever the fuck you want. You just have to report if you feel sick
I was in Taipei last week. The whole quarantine thing is pure theater. You sign a form when you arrive saying you'll do this that and the other thing. Then once you exit the airport, you can forget all about it. The hotel doesn't even police any of your shit. They give you a COVID test and tell you to take it after 24hrs. Mine went straight in the trash after exiting the airport.
You still have to wear a mask everywhere, even outside, which is so fucking retarded it hurts. The little police on the street or in the subway will give you shit about it.
>Japan with more sovl
That would be Hsinking, Manchuria. Not Taipei.
Taipei is unironically the only East Asian metropolis where I've seen open street defecation. The weather is also glum and depressing half the year. All the buildings are old and shabby looking. Things look stuck 20 years in the past. Also, mosquitoes in the city are relentless. A sign of poor urban administration as you can keep your windows wide open in Tokyo and encounter no mosquitoes at all.
>Things look stuck 20 years in the past.
That's perfect, because I've always loved the 90s/early 2000s aesthetic.
backwards city: :l
backwards city, taiwank: 😮
>open street defecation
You just were unlucky, and either saw someone who just had the shits badly and had to think in a hurry, or some mentally ill person. I've been there for years and never saw anything of the sort.
>The weather is also glum and depressing half the year.
Yeah, it's called "winter and fall", and the last years it's really been like that for a few months only. The rest of the time, it's pretty hot and sunny. You just have a week or two of non stop rain at some point it stops. And don't bring up the rare typhoons that hit Taipei with but a more than welcome fresh breeze during summer.
> All the buildings are old and shabby looking. Things look stuck 20 years in the past.
SOVL, also that's complete bull and is only an exterior thing. Malls, MRT Stations, restaurants and housing actually looks more than decent from outside. I live in Yonghe and we literally have a marble atrium with magnificent columns, and that's true of a shit ton of condos in new taipei city, both north and south.
>Also, mosquitoes in the city are relentless. A sign of poor urban administration as you can keep your windows wide open in Tokyo and encounter no mosquitoes at all.
Tokyo is a world-class megacity on the same parallel as Busan whereas Taipei is a very green, humid, mountain-surrounded city in an island that cuts into the tropic.
Just say you're a mandchurian liar and a jealous man.
>Taiwan 'expat' defending Taipei's utter inferiority to its East Asian neighbors.
Did you move to Taipei for reasons of low COL, laidback life, and easy women? I have no issue if you did. All are good justifications for a man to move there. Just don't delude yourself. I wasn't just unlucky to witness street shitting, it's because they don't build enough public toilets. The few that I encountered were dirty and poorly maintained.
>Tokyo is a world-class megacity on the same parallel as Busan whereas Taipei is a very green, humid, mountain-surrounded city in an island that cuts into the tropic.
Singapore and Shenzhen are both green and humid and I can say the same about them. No biting insect issues, leave the windows open all the time. In Taipei you go to sleep without a mosquito net, and you wake up to bites.
>we literally have a marble atrium with magnificent columns, and that's true of a shit ton of condos in new taipei city, both north and south.
This is every new apartment building in mainland China too. So what.
>no biting insect issues in singapore
Aaand thats where i'm calling BS. Having lived there for a year, it's unbearable. Shenzhen I don't know about, but a simple google search and you find all types of people complaining about that too. Now maybe you meant that there weren't a lot of mosquitos indoors, in which case that is true of all three, due to their use of AC and mosquito nets.
The irony is, I couldn't give two shits about you complaining about taiwan, as long as your reasons are legit. If you would've complained about the cockroaches, or the spiders, or the fact that the city is ridiculously small and you always feel like you're in a small village because you're always 1km away from rurality, that the country isn't interesting if not for hiking and Taipei, or that the expat community is basically boring boomers, i would've said you make a fair point.
But instead you're giving me a weird anecdote about how you saw someone who was probably ill poo in the street and telling me that a city that has an actual winter and little greenery relative to Taipei has less mosquitoes. The LARP has to stop.
>dirty and poorly maintained
There are toilets on most MRT station and they're always clean to a T and so do some 7/11
I lived there in summer and saw roaches but whats up with the spiders?
Do i need to pack the flamethrower next time?
We get Huntsman. Good luck
aaaaaand i'm out.
Singapore gets you full of insect bites, ever been there?
I lived there. In urban developed/residential area there's no mosquito problem. Obviously if you go to Fort Canning park at dusk you will get attacked by biting insects.
I love how I live in the middle of no where in Taiwan and my experience has been so much better than yours
Because he's a larper. He has no experience, just wanted to chime in to feel heard. Proof is his inability to answer to >2346135 .He must've mixed up Thailand and Taiwan, no doubt.
anyone recommend ways to learn mandarin? i wanna go really bad i have a taiwanese buddy who lives there and he is turbo based
I've been learning Mandarin for 3 months and I'd like to second this anon's desire for some opinions on the process
I've been anki-droning for an hour a day, doing listening practice on mandarinbean.com, collecting and practicing a couple useful sentences, and not much else.
Aside from reading novels, my goal with the language is almost mainly just to feel what it's like to have a new language in my head
yeah the tones are the main thing keeping me form learning it. I cant graps them and if theyll apparently make me not understandable then whats the point
Well get started homie and see how you like it.
Worst case scenario you learn a couple new things about a language even if you quit in a month
true true im gonna do it bros wml
Good luck anon! *kiss*
Three+ years of learning here and personally sometimes I feel like I've wasted a lot of time. It comes in useful dating chicks but I do wish I picked Japanese instead.
Why?
If your tones aren't perfect, when it comes to intellectual discussion 80% of your meaning or points will be lost or confused. Imagine some foreigner speaking English but slurs constantly their words and you can't even understand if they're saying concept, contempt or misconception, but it's like this for 80% the words out their mouth. That's what foreigners with mediocre tones sound like to Taiwanese and Chinese.
Its incredibly frustrating
yeah i speak intermediate jap (going for jlpt this dec) and i focus on phonetics a lot because i hate the idea of sounding like a foreigner. It seems so ambiguous to learn tones for someone kinda tone deaf like myself
Thanks for sharing.
If you don't mind my asking, what's stopping you from spending two months or so intensively grinding tones? Why isn't it that simple? Thanks
You can't just "grind tones" in two months anon. Unless you're Vietnamese or some shit and have a tonal mother tongue.
If you're a European tones are a complete alien concept and will take years of grinding and attention. So many intermediate Chinese learners think they're hot shit but their tones are complete dogshit. Taiwanese themselves always joke about foreigners by imitating incorrect tones or speak in flat speech.
Imagine some Asian boomer that's lived in the US for 40yrs but still has his thick chink accent. He wouldn't be able to fix it in two months and neither can a Chinese learner.
You're retarded. Tones are literally noises you make with your mouth and throat. This is equivalent to saying someone could never ever learn to sing or play a foreign instrument, because the sounds are just too alien to comprehend and reproduce.
If you focus on tone pronunciation, you will get better.
Well why don't you vocaroo your opinion on the war in Ukraine anon so we can tell how perfect your pronunciation and tones are.
Also many foreigners fall for the chink compliments about how "amazing" their Chinese is and think they're already fluent when their somewhere around intermediate. Actually you're probably not fluent, they're just being polite because you're studying their language.
All I can say is try applying for a few interpreting roles and see how fluent you really are. Suddenly when you're faced with an actual challenge as I gave you might realize you've got some time to go before you've obtained general fluency.
Ironically, the tones aren't that hard if you're not completely tone deaf and can understand the notion of pitch. If only everyone was forced to only and exclusively practice their tones for two months before doing anything in Chinese, far more people would sound actually intelligible.
You can technically grind tones provided you actually exclusively focus on that and discuss how to do so with people who learned it in the same non-organic way.
Chinese folks telling you how to pronounce a tone is like telling what a color is to a blind person. It's so taken for granted that they've never truly learned how to efficiently explain that to the uninitiated.
I'll move the goalpost by saying that while you may not become a true master of spoken chinese, you'll at least be very articulate and clear. So by all means, if you're grinding tones, try to sound as exaggerated and retarded at possible at first. By the end of the two months you'll actually be way better than the majority of non chinese mandarin speakers.
Only as you practice it with the locals will you get the second aspect of Chinese musicality, which is basically the overall sentence intonation which will make you truly sound authentic. Of course you've probably learned how to sound natural if you're asking a question vs stating something, but you'll hone your skills better that way.
This being said taiwanfags are pretty tolerant when it comes to tones.
Studying tones doesn't just end when you can pronounce Pinyin somewhat accurately anon.
They're linked to your vocabulary and need to be memorized for each and every new word you learn. This is why oral Chinese is a kick in the balls compared to Japanese. If you say something second tone when it's actually fourth tone, your total meaning could be lost if the context isn't obvious. It doesn't matter how "clear" you can pronounce a tone or word if your tones are used incorrectly.
Many foreigners after the first 6-12 months get lazy with learning tones as they learn new vocabulary. Often this leads to bad habits that are almost impossible to fix after a few years.
The real fun starts when you put together full and complex sentences, now you suddenly have to switch tones rapidly and connect the words.
you're basically repeating what I said. You can learn how to pronounce tones in a rigorous way, then as you talk to people and get used to that, you end up learning how to have the correct intonations. I don't get where i'm contradicted here. My point was that through rigorous application for two months, you could get at least get your tones clear. Which isn't hard and is worth doing because will at least be articulate.
Honestly ? I've already had to prove in /int/ that i spoke french in a flawless french accent. They called my accent fake and gay.
I'm a white Parisian dude.
and if you think Chinese compliments mean something to me after all these years of living in taiwan, i mean come on man.
because tones are part of the word retard, so when you use the second instead of the fourth you're saying another word
it's like complaining you need to properly write words in English instead of randomly replacing a with e and that people don't understand you when you ESL worse than an Indian
tones aren't separate from the word, they are the word
I have a monotone voice, whenever I try to inflect it sounds awkward and forced. Should I just give up on ever learning Chinese? I'm learning Japanese right now for this very reason. That and I heard the pronunciation is very similar to Spanish, which I'm already fluent in.
If you want to learn Chinese you'll have to learn them, it's part of the language. It's like saying you don't want to learn conjugation since you suck at memorization.
>tones aren't that hard if you're not completely tone deaf and can understand the notion of pitch
well fuck
I studied Japanese for 1 year and happy I switched to Chinese. The grammar for Japanese is so difficult. Chinese tones are a bitch but I can understand Chinese much easier than I could for Japanese
The tones are the easiest part of Chinese lmao. There are only 4 tones you retard. English has tones too. Think about a surprise party when the person opens the door and everyone yells “surprise!” in a high tone. Then think about when someone pulls out a gun and says “surprise, bitch” in a falling tone. The word “surprise” has different connotations with different tones. Chinese is like that with every word.
Pimsleur has a good mandarin course. In addition to Anki I used the app Scripts (and its parent app Drops) to learn Hanzi.
Here’s a link to the best Anki deck for Mandarin.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/7mjmjc/best_anki_deck_for_hsk_ive_come_across/
Good luck
>theyll apparently make me not understandable
this point is overrated. context is more important to understanding and if you are talking to a chinese speaker then the situation is likely obvious and while they may struggle to get a word and it might need a few attempts, you will make it through the conversation. you are not going to have deep personal conversations while you have shit chinese level, but using the wrong tone when you are trying to buy laundry detergent isn't going to make a huge difference.
It won't but if you don't get your habits straightened up quick you'll be annoying to listen to. Not getting your tone right is worse than having to listen to an indian dude who actively sucks at english. You'll get through it but you won't like the experience.
use hackingchinese to get your tones. i paid for a course after having lived in china for years and having studied chinese at chinese university and the hacking chinese course was still useful in getting tones and importantly tone pairs down pat.
a more useful technique than reading books may be finding a tv show with subtitles and writing and then reading the transcript of the subtitles, mimicking the speaker. you might want to look at Language Reactor app/extension if you want to do this.
they are 2 tools i found useful after i already had competence.
if your first language is english there is no easy or quick way to learn it. why do you think its rated as one of the hardest languages to learn? ive been at it for years and im still far from fluent.
Maybe try free Mandarin courses from Coursera? I took the first one (https://www.coursera.org/learn/learn-chinese) and I have a fundemental base now. They are not perfect obviously but Pekin University is a respected one and teacher isn't bad. You can also request a scholarship (they give it to everyone) to get its certificate. They have several lectures on Mandarin and Chinese characters. Also if you really want to go and enjoy Taiwan for yourself you might want to get a language scholarship too. I believe they call it Huayu Enrichment Scholarship. I don't know the details very much but its worth checking.
Honestly the fastest way would probably be college level classes, otherwise the usual Anki grind plus tone and grammar practice I suppose. I took Mandarin in my undergrad and I actually made really fast progress because I feared my professor and thus studied my ass off and got to practice the language quite a bit. Plus its fun seeing old Chinese women that are usually the instructors dab on literally everyone including Chinese people because they don't hold back. Fortunately she loved me as a student so I was never on the receiving end of that.
>scared of my teacher
Lmao low test fingerlings typed that post
Ok so, aside from the blog post i've posted here (teachyourselfmandarin), mandarin is something that needs to be spoken. You need to talk mandarin, and you need to do it with someone that will be very demanding when it comes to your tone, and will be ok with speaking in a slow articulate way for you.
Your best bet is to get a good mic, and go to preply and take courses, but don't focus on HSK preparation yet. Just have some fun discussing things in chinese, and tell your teacher to keep it in pinyin for a while. The issue with "real" courses is that they suck at this, making you spend hours writing chinese characters so you can recognize them when really, that should be left for when you have a satisfying mastery of oral chinese.
Learning chinese through anki and all that stuff is fine and dandy but if you can't speak it you'll suck. This is something that is best reserved for people who currently live in china/taiwan, because they're bathing in a sinophone environment and need to improve their vocab. Three months in, you're probably not even there yet.
tbh you don't even need to know how to write it or even read it for now. You need to speak it. the Assimil books are great with that because they precisely focus on grammar and vocab while doing it in pinyin for at least most of the first volume.
Also, don't worry about homophones. Chinese is extremely context heavy. If you're articulate, words with even the same tone can be understood provided your sentence is well constructed and inambiguous.
Once you 're done with that, that you know how to pronounce words and tones correctly and be able to conduct a basic conversation, you can start having fun with radicals, and anki shit. If you don't do it this way, you'll give up, because as long as you're not there, it's pretty much worthless and extremely frustrating, since character memorization is an extremely tedious and slow process while oral chinese is pretty fucking easy.
Dude, I want to read Chinese, not speak it. It's pointless so say >just learn to speak first when I have zero interest in doing so and am only interested in the characters.
Porbably gonna get a lot of hate for this but...don't bother. Really.
I have spent years studying mandarin and I consider it to be a big mistake. I am fluent-ish and have lived in China and studied at Peking U.
To be able to use it for work you will need years of immersive and intesnive study. Even then, most fail.
I planned to live and work there as well..after how they handled covid and treat foreigners I won't even consider it anymore.
Seriously, learn a language spoken in a country you can actually travel to and that doesnt bolt people into aparments and round up pets in bags to burn them. Take 1/10th of the time and learn any other language.
I have a few close Chinese friends but in general as poeple the Chinese are very materialistic, greedy, cold hearted, racist, and uneducated.
Mandarin has a lot of use outside of China.
Where? In their African colonies?
Not him but having fucked around in Asia for many years it is quite useful. Definitely the third most useful language here after 1. the local language and 2.english. Lots of locals here now can speak or are learning Chinese. Also the Chinese diaspora can be quite helpful and tightnit. For example, when I arrived at a small Korean city I had to find an apartment. I went to the one with the sign "我们欢迎同胞“ ("we welcome our compatriots" which is a phrase Chinese abroad use to welcome other Chinese into their business) because there was not a realtor in sight that had a sign saying they could speak English. Later on I would go to the Chinese driving school, the chinese hair salon and the Chinese supermarkets cause I couldn't speak a word of Korean. Similar story when I was in Thailand and Vietnam.
Only place I found the language quite useless was in Latin America where there is (for some odd reason) practically zero Chinese influence there. The Chinese you do find will be immigrants who came 100 years ago and speak a weird local Guangdong village language.
1. He heavily implied he was going to Taiwan, not mainland China
2. You sound incredibly butthurt
3. You will need years of immersive and intensive study for practically ANY language. For me personally it took two years (one of intensive study and one year of casual study). I'm currently learning Japanese and it's way harder than Chinese.
Your Chinese must be garbage. Lived there and I found the people to be incredibly friendly and honest. Quite uncooth but I'll take uncoot and friendly over extremely polite and incredibly unfriendly South Koreans or Canadians. Chinese are similar to Vietnamese in that regard but I find Vietnamese more friendly (and also more uncouth).
It's worth learning in Taiwan. Not fit work but to better interact with people
nope
>I have a few close Chinese friends but in general as poeple the Chinese are very materialistic, greedy, cold hearted, racist, and uneducated.
No offence but you sound like a retarded, immature sperg.
What he said is 100% accurate I also wasted, 6/7 years learning Chinese and lived in Shanghai for 6m or so. What a fkn waste of time. And as that guy said its legit hard study to learn it, which could be put to 100 things more useful. Fuck China and Fuck Chinese, worst mistake of my life and I learned to HSK 6 .
Any of u retards that actually want to learn it:
italki find the cheapest tutor u can and just talk shit with her.
Anki, just smash out words in this.
That's all I never touched a stupid boring text book in my life.
>tard who took years to reach b2 whines about the language being hard
>its legit hard study to learn it
it is so hard that chinese kids can learn it.
>I'm probably gunna get hate for this
Yeah cause your post oozes of butthurt.
Im heading to Taiwan next week! Any recommendations?
it's actually Japan but with more SOUL
So, China then?
Except it's not third world like China
>t. never been to a tier 1 city
It's so funny that mutts think China is some third-world shithole, when in reality China is clean, safe, and getting very rich. Outside of homelessness, moron worship, and druggies, what is the USA better at?
Doesn't China still have like 600-900 million medieval peasants grinding away their lives in rural poverty?
says who? You been there?
you're picture doesn't contradict his point, and only a braindead chink would think it does
40% of Chinese make less than $140 a month
Seething Chink
They no longer live in poverty because glorious comrade Winnie changed the definition of poverty.
Nope, they've been using the standard UN definition. keep smoking the copium mutt.
By using chinese measures. Which we know are the most reliable and transparent in the world.
No they hookers and peddler in major cities now and pop media brainwashed
Corporation rule like tencent and meituan
bro, tencent lost like 650billion just a couple of weeks ago with tech crackdown
China is a third world shithole. Your lying just makes you more pathetic
China is irrelevant. Sure, it's bigger and more diverse, but everything beyond the scope of your first tier city will be a bitch to deal with. Our point in these threads aren't necessarily to just gawk at Taiwan and hate on China, but on realistically living or visiting the place.
China was a bitch to live in because you have little to literally no chance to get a PR even if I get married with a local, food safety and regulation have been proven to be thoroughly unreliable, and the Chinese government in general has proven that they were anti-immigration, and yes, anything that is 20 mile away from at least a 2nd tier city is third world, from the roads, to the people, to even the safety. I say was, because you can't even get in. So who gives a flying fuck about China being better than the US if you can't fucking join them ? Why would that matter ?
On the other hand, Taiwan welcomes you with its arms open, you get a shot at a PR after 5 years (or if you get married), they have a Gold Card scheme for qualified immigrants, the tap water isn't going to turn you into a gay frog, the food (even street food, never got sick in 4 years of gorging myself with the stuff) is all safe for consumption, and if there is a kid snatcher in the area (which there isn't, because taipei is among the safest cities in the world), the govt doesn't censor the story to pretend everything's all right and good.
I mean you can keep sucking Chinese cock and continue this debate but they don't give a flying fuck about you and they don't like you. So why side with them ? What's the point ? Why the endless comparisons with fucking China in a Taiwanese city thread ?
>So who gives a flying fuck about China being better than the US if you can't fucking join them ? Why would that matter ?
Because my cucked country is turning into a globohomo immigrant shithole due to your zog controlled mutt country. China isn't influencing my country to accept immigrants, China isn't shoving BLM, LGBT, feminism and diversity down my country's throat. Is China anti-immigrant? Great. I hope it stays that way and in 100 years China will stay as China. Compared to a shithole like France or Sweden that will turn into Somalia in 50 years. That is why I side with China and want my country to side with China. It isn't China that is flying the BLM and pride flag at their embassy in my country, your retarded country and it's globohomo vassal states are. in my country I am already seeing most of the adverts having 1/5th black people despite them being something like 0.5% of the population. A lot of the "human rights organizations" that encourage globohomo behavior are ~~*coincidentally*~~ linked to the US. Must just be a coincidence though, I'm sure. If you want to continue sucking mutt cock go ahead. Enjoy having your children transitioning, brainwashed into hating their race/gender and your daughters getting BLACKED. You brought this world onto yourself and only have yourself to blame. This is why I support China.
Why should I care that your country is crap again ? lol
I'm having the time of my life in taiwan. Maybe you would too. If you're terrified of catching the gay because you saw one dude with lip gloss, go to Singapore. Like all the 4chanfags roaming in this board, you sound like you have a very sad life and are constantly preoccupied about your future. Why not do something about it by getting the fuck out rather than shitposting non-stop on threads that do not give a fuck about you ?
I mean, the only reason why i singled you out of all posts is because you're a guaranteed bump.
Cool it with the butthurt, Chang. West Taiwan is heading towards collapse, with Winnie the Accelerator only making the inevitable come faster.
>West Taiwan
OMG what a brave r*dittor, have my upvote Queen.
China literally owns 1/3 of reddit. Seethe Chang
I'm not asking if that matters for them, you fucking idiot, it's whether it would matter to YOU. There is nothing in what they do that would better your outcome in life. Nothing you have described would somehow make your kids less likely want to transition than mine. Ironically, by being a fucking cucked retard who thinks some abstract idea of the state is worth more than the betterment of your life ad your family, you've doomed them and yourself. This is why the only meaningful impact you fuckers have is school shootings
>Clean
>Safe
The food you eat has been cooked in oil scooped out of the gutters
gutter oil actually was a scandal that orginiated in taiwan... https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/opinion/taiwans-gutter-oil-scandal.html
China is a third world shithole. Taiwan is not.
>t. Dennis Hsiao-Hsiung
They both are shitholes. However China (outside of first tier cities) I expect to be a shithole as it's still developing. Taiwan however still manages to be a shithole despite being first world. Weird as fuck .
the east side and the rural villages are vietnam tier. i would put taipei and kaohsiung as the equivalent of chinese tier 2 cities. i've never been to taoyuan so have no idea how that compares to anything.
rural everywhere is shithouse you fucking retard. only retards would expect villages to have the luxuries as huge cities
kys gay
This is what regional chinese cities look like in 2022
Wumaos even patrol sighsee now? They are so obvious, always posting the same CCP videos, anytime someone shows the real China.
>the real China is some backwater 3k pop village that's not even in any maps
guess the real USA is skid row
>the real China is some backwater 3k pop village that's not even in any maps
Yes.
I love child brides as much as any other Real Traveller, but let's be serious here
>the real USA is skid row
Yes
You are just jealous of China because it's a free country with a good government
Free of what?
chink triggered
Where do you guys stay in Taipei? I stayed near Zhongxiao Xinsheng station last time and apartments there were more expensive than Tokyo.
Everything else was fine, but I couldn't find decent and cheap places in Taipei at all.
Taipei isn't cheap, a decent studio in Taipei is gonna cost you like 20,000-22,000 a month without electric bills.
Average TEFL fags wages are like 50-55k a month. Taiwan is cheap when you leave Taipei and go somewhere like Taichung, then that 55k you're only gonna be paying 12k for housing.
>decent and cheap
We don't know what you definition of decent and cheap is. Decent and cheap for me means
NTD below
>at least 10坪
>a single room and my own kitchen and bathroom plus toilet
>supermarket and gym one or two blocks away
>quiet neighborhood, not in front of a large road
>MRT station less than 10 minutes away
>close to my office
This is easily doable anywhere in Taipei, even in Da'an.
If you want a large space or just want something cheaper, your only option is to cross the river and live in New Taipei City. Yonghe, Banqiao, Sanchong, Xindian, Shilin.
If you can communicate in Chinese, another option to stay inside Taipei is to find a 頂樓加蓋. These are the rooms you see on rooftops and they are technically illegal. You can't put this on your address (you'll be using the top floor address), but everyone does this and no one really cares. Much cheaper than a proper apartment unit, but it comes with its own issues.
In what world do you think you can get your own place in Taipei for 20k lmao. Maybe gaoxiong but if you want something in central Taipei you're gonna need to double that number minimum
You've clearly never lived in Taipei so just shut the fuck up.
Pic related is all in Da'an.
Anon most of those are shared apartments, the one that isn't is a top floor dinglou.
You shouldn't rent a dinglou because the roof is a thin scrap of sheet metal with plasterboard and your AC bill is going to push that to 18k rent to 20k+ in the summer as it leaks in hot air. You'll be living in a literal furnace. They're also illegal and unsafe to live in. Wet season their prone to leaks from typhoon rain and roaches.
The anon saying to rent such places is trolling.
If that's what you honestly think then you either lack the brain cells necessary to perform a simple search or you're talking out of your ass and parroting whatever you've seen online.
>no taiwanese is paying $650 a month for rent
This is another gross exaggeration similar to the other guy saying 20000 NTD is impossible in the middle of Taipei.
t. lived in Taipei in two 3 year stints plus another year's worth of visits.
20k is the starting price for an actual apartment, you know a basic regular place with a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, washing machine, room for an actual table and chairs. A place to dry clothes.
When I say a decent apartment I don't mean the shit your posting with a toilet, sink and bed within one metre of each other.
Keep moving goal posts. The guy asked for a decent and cheap apartment within Taipei and I provided my own definition of decent and cheap.
>don't know how to search for an apartment
>can't read
Yeah I guess the problem is that you're dyslexic.
I can guarantee all those places are infested with roaches
ok so disregard all the retards and consider the following redpill and picrel.
the problem with the taiwanese downtown is that it spans half the fucking city with many nevralgic centers (Dongmen, Ximen, 101, Technology Building, Main Station, Digital Plaza around Songjiang Nanjing etc.). So as long as you're within the city limits (even if you're not, you're never THAT far), It'll take you as much time to walk to the station than to get to your station of choice. I highly suggest living near the green line (so, the green zone) because that practically gets you anywhere and is well connected to the red Line (which basically covers the more expensive Da'an area). You could also consider living up north where the black area is. This is where a lot of older expats live, but i don't know much about it besides Yuanshan with its Maji Square (and its Triangle)
You want cheap but nice addresses, look around Wanshan and Zhongzheng District. If that's too much, you can still settle for something around Xindian without missing out on the rest of Taipei since it's not that far. Also, the 648 bus basically goes from the deeper end of xindian all the way to City Hall, so even if you're a cheap hack you can make do with that. Because yes, knowing how the buses work in Taipei will save you a *lot* of money.
>Zhongxiao Xinsheng
every "Zhongxiao X" is one of the more bougie part of Taipei, along with 101. The SOGO at Fuxing sets the tone perfectly, filled with Fendi and Gucci and Louis Vuitton crap.
where would you recommend staying for a week stay?
So my explanations were pertaining to long terrm accomodation. For a short term stay, Ximen would be my personal choice if you truly want to enjoy Taipei in all its glory. Great surroundings, great place to be at, a nice feeling. Second place would be Dongmen for the same reason, but Ximen being on the blue Line gets you to Taipei City Hall/101 area way faster. but tbh anything i've circled goes, except the green part below gongguan which is a tad far imho, as well as Jiantan on the red line.
Also a lot of hotels are under 50 but still of great quality, so look for those.
Thanks!
I know this is a fucking annoying question but is there anything you highly recommend doing which is overlooked by tourists (or not)? I'll be there in a few days
Not an annoying question at all.
>Taipei
Hike the south mountain area accessed through Xiangshan. See some folksy temples. Go to the highest lookout point with some drinks/snacks and watch the city turn to dusk. Go to Raohe market after.
Taoyuan city centre Tonlin Plaza is secretly based for picking up easy local girls.
Ximending is sovlless. Don't stay there.
If you have the time, spend a night at a hot spring resort near the city.
>Ximending is sovlless. Don't stay there.
I disagree. Hotels there are relatively cheap, and the MRT station drops you pretty much everywhere interesting, unless you need the red line, in which case you're one stop away from Main Station. Also, Ximen itself is very convenient due to the amount of stores that aren't that expensive.
https://teachyourselfmandarin.wordpress.com/
Follow this. This is the best way, but it's also the hardest way.
Come to linkou use line to hook up women in motel
>use line to hook up women in motel
you mean the "people nearby" feature in line? Does it have anything other than fakes and scammers there?
>Taoyuan city centre Tonlin Plaza is secretly based for picking up easy local girls
Tell us more about this, anon.
Several modern department store shopping malls next to Taoyuan station that's a 45 minute ride from downtown Taipei. Taoyuan residents who commute to Taipei for work often end their evenings at Tonlin area (it is downtown Taoyuan) and Taoyuan people are less used to foreign tourist trash. Plenty of hourly hotels nearby. You can leverage it in your favor and easily approach women who relaxing after a long week of work or pick up some drunk locals who are horny and want to relieve themselves with some foreign no-strings attached cock. Did it myself several times.
Any hostels/hotels you (or anyone else) recommend? Having a hard time deciding as there's so many options.
What part of Taipei would be its equivalent to the Upper East Side or Upper West Side in Manhattan? Rich, upscale, more quiet, but lots of shopping and restaurants.
Da'an District.
Da'an district, especially if you can get something closer to the park
please shut the fuck up, no taiwanese is paying $650 a month for rent
you can get an okay furnished place for $400 a month, stop fucking trolling, the country is poor as shit
Ok, I'm going to Taiwan 11th-18th Nov. What to do?
>Ok, I'm going to Taiwan 11th-18th Nov. What to do?
What you're gonna do is wear a mask 24/7 like a little cuck slave bug
Sun moon lake
Does anyone know if you have to stay in the same hotel for the first 7 days during the 0+7 period or can you do whatever you want
Oh thats a good question actually
I want to travel around the island or at least have ac ouple of nights outside Taipei
I did some research, you don't need to stay at the same hotel. They dont check accommodation or anything like that
Can you send a source for that info? One hotel I contacted said they'd only let me stay if it was for 8 nights during the 0+7 period
Comments on this post
https://www.traveltaiwanduringcovid19.com/538/home-quarantine-policy/
and
https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/xs51qa/comment/iryzy3r/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Individiual hotels are able to say whatever they want of course, but there's no legal requirement to stay at the same hotel, and nobody checks your accom on entry
Taiwan is basically China but not third world and the people don't act like broke peasants.
Taipei maybe
Go to the south and it's Vietnam tier
Vietnam is far better than China
Seething Tran Nguyen
Vietnam btfo 27 of your invasions in a row
It's essentially China just 20 years in the past. Less developed, less internet censorship, less competent government, etc. In 15 years it will be where China is today. They are already trying to implement the Chinese firewall there.
Taiwanese cockblock less than Korean guys and let you fuck their women but Taiwanese girls are more flakey.
Im talking women that haven't hit 25+ so aren't in desperate find a husband territory. Those chicks are easy lays if you pump and dump
what's a realistic monthly budget for Taipei? For reference I live on $1200 in Bangkok
You could live on the same amount of money without any real issues. with 400 bucks you can find a place with a roommate, and with 600 bucks you could get something alone somewhere in the city. Electricity/water may not come too cheap if you're an AC enjoyer but it shouldn't go above 100$ if you're not terminally retarded. Food isn't 'as cheap as bangkok but you should have no problem with 300 bucks. The rest can go into savings, clothes or booze.
Does anyone like brutal but homeland security national revolution army show?
u get t65k2 with bayonet and clothes if u will to act but bad for street reputation
I'm in Japan and don't like it much so yeah there are probably better whores there and they are less racist. I hope China opens. I would marry a chinese hooker.
>I hope China opens
Literally why? I spent 3 months there, almost died 3 times and had so much food poisoning. Never had those issues in Taiwan.
Cope. never got food poisoning and I lived there for 6 years. I had laduzi though but if you avoid Hispanicy food/hot pot you can avoid laduzi.
Why were you living in China? Do you speak Chinese? Did you enjoy your time there? Is it really as much of a shit hole as I make it in my head?
>pure blooded europeans
Is as retarded as saying "pure blooded asians".
Europe is a gigantic region containing a shit ton of ethnicities that melded and mixed throughout history. A spaniard has nothing to do with a swede and same with anglos and greeks. Europe is a giant melting pot of rape.
>Taiwan has more pure chinese
I love Taiwan and I am seriously tired of all the larpers who come in with their retarded theories and no care about basic history. You're fitting round pegs in square holes here.
Taiwan was heavily involved with the japs, with many taiwanese having japanese ancestry (my ex-gf did, and it shows). Add to that the mainlanders that came with CKS, and the guys from Fujian, the Hakka, and the aboriginals.
Finally, the Han racemixing was happening for centuries now. It's done. Hans are pretty much the same all over the place with only slight differences.
Lmao
Cao ni ma chinkoid
wo bu shi zhongguoren 🙁
>Taiwan has more pure Chinese
I'm not sure if your really retarded or a bot. Taiwan was colonized for 100 years by the Japanese, invaded by Fuzhounese immigrants and has an Austronesian moron population that is essentially just Filipinos. There is also the 50 extra years of being westernized that has made them MUCH more susceptible to interracial marriages. In short, you're an idiot.
this thread serves as a great reminder of just how many retarded teenagers frequent this site
That's a retarded take since Taiwan get's far lower tourist numbers (especially from the west) than any major Asian country
I visited Taiwan in 2019 for a couple of weeks. Taipei has a feel to it that Seoul and Tokyo don't get close to approaching.
If the food was as good as in Japan, I would recommend it overall. For everything else non-weeb, it is a definite improvement.
Even the tourist traps have a real charm to them. But the best time I had was on the east coast, where I ended up hitchhiking a lot. Most of the people who picked me up had never done it before, so I had some good chats with the locals, in extremely broken english.
I would spend some time going all over the island. Visiting small towns, and heading inland (like up the Taroko Gorge).
There's no way anyone can tell me this kind of sovl is present in Korea, at least. Maybe in parts of Japan.
Looks....like China lol
Yea minus everyone trying to pick pocket you, no dog eating or street shitting either
you say that like you've seen what every single person in taiwan does every single minute of the day. Easy on the koolaid brother.
In two weeks I am going to visit taiwan for a week.
I am comfortable solo travelling but have never done anything like hitchhiking which seems very daunting. i am very very introverted but speak B1 mandarin and practicing/immersing is a major motivator for the trip
what do
I had never hitchhiked before, don't speak any mandarin, and I'm introverted. But after 3 weeks of travelling total, I needed to speak to someone.
Pretty shit. The only conversations I was able to have were with mormon missionaries. I saw a few of them there.
>Pretty shit
Ah shit I better get on with it then, tbh I think I'll be ok if I stop being a bitch about learning tones
The most useful thing I found was knowing enough kanji that I could sort of read menus and signs. But in terms of speaking, I couldn't even say yes or no.
Still I managed to get someone to arrange a pretty dodgy local taxi guy to get me somewhere else. Without any common languages.
Throughout the whole trip, I was impressed with just how friendly everyone was.
Yeah imma start grinding
What's the social life like over there? I'm a former shutin and I wanna make up for my wasted youth experiences, are there many opportunities to make friends?
Former introvert. You instantly become a chad if you are from a western country because everyone wants to talk to you. Just today I was walking to work and a 50 year old woman stopped me to take my picture.
Are you getting laid there? How hard is it if you're a decent looking white guy?
>Just today I was walking to work and a 50 year old woman stopped me to take my picture.
I thought this behavior is typical in places that have never seen foreigners of a different race in person. Even though Taiwan is fairly small, are there really still towns or cities in Taiwan like that?
In the city of Miaoli where I live (pop 90,000) 8 whites live in the city. So we aren't unseen but probably the first time they saw one in a month or 2. They are very curious people
>They are very curious people
Why doesn't that happen in japan outside of maybe creepshotting? Surely there are some towns that barely see foreigners. Or maybe I'm wrong.
Yeah because he's a fucking autist. Lotsa anglophones in taipei, and a whole lot of actual anglophones at any expat bar. Start with the revolver.
>mormon missionaries
i met some of those when i was there. interesting to chat to them, i guess i made a change from them trying to talk to locals.
I met some mormons too in Taichung, I was riding my youbike and we're stopped at a red light and took the opportunity to talk to me.
They are really everywhere! Like Jehovah's witnesses!
>practicing/immersing is a major motivator for the trip
I'm planning to immerse but I'm going to Singapore first. It's the halfway house.
hai sir .... god morning ... how much creampie INR taiwan???? thx u sir ....
What's English proficiency like among 18-30 year olds in Taipei?
I wanna make frens with the locals but I don't think I have the mental capacity to get a hold on Mandarin before I go over there
Just start grinding Anki decks and you will learn it. A small amount goes a long way.
Been texting damsels the past couple of days and saving all of their useful sentences
Just spent 2 hours sitting on my bathroom floor grinding tones.
Now awaiting a call with a native speaker who hopefully isnt too nice to not tell me that they're all shit
havin fun
>grinding tones
All... four of them?
they have to be practiced in pairs, and there are 20 tone pairs. (4x4 + 4 neutral)
this site is a good one for tone drills
http://maorma.net/Practice.aspx?Mode=Listening
You don't need any of that lol. Just practice sentences and phrases. You'll learn the melodies of sentences and you won't have to think about each word/tone because it will be a string of sounds. Like in English we say "I'm going to go to the car" as "I'mmonnagohduthecar" without thinking about the component words
> they have to be practiced in pairs
The fuck they do
How the fuck do you guys deal with the heat? This country is so fucking hot and humid I feel like I wake up in an oven every day and struggle to get to sleep every night.
Many ways. AC and Fan is the way. Make sure you pack a shit ton of cotton shirts too.
If you don't have an AC, find another appartment or leave the country. Nobody puts up with it, not even most locals
Florida is hotter than Taiwan and yet I live in complete comfort. It’s almost as if some guy invented a device for cooling air.
Unless you're deaf, I can't picture a scenario where you would
(AND COULD) only need to read chinese and not speak it unless you're into ancient chinese literature. In which case you'd be taking a specialized course that would require you to understand oral chinese.
You could do it in your own autistic way, but nobody fucking does that so good luck
I only care about learning Chinese to read online novels
I mean Hanzi characters are not phonetic. You can just learn the English meanings of the characters if you want. Heisig style
You definitely can. It's just retarded is all. You'd have to apply chinese grammar to english words, which would sound and function extremely awkwardly.
A language is a package deal. Depriving yourself of your hearing memory and ability will slow down the learning process considerably.
I mean sure, the idea of focusing on the oral aspect of it is definitely something i'd recommend to someone who, say, is planning to go there and where a good drive of oral chinese is far more important than written, but plain ignoring the hearing and listening aspect would deprive you from one more way for your brain to memorize and associate words with characters. And for someone willing to go as far as being able to read a novel without looking constantly at a dictionary, you're looking at something by the looks of HSK5. That's 4 years of regular study of Mandarin for you. More if you're not practicing regularly, less if you go to China/Taiwan, so why even bother ?
Oh, and that's only for modern chinese lit. Heavens forbid you try the ancient ones even the locals have trouble with.
You're seriously fucking retarded if you think Taiwan is cheap Japan. Taiwan is a slightly cleaner mainland China, but China nonetheless.
I was in Tokyo and Taipei last week for business. The thing about Taiwan is that they are really good at copying the aesthetic of Japan, but beyond the thin veneer, shit is still Chinese as fuck.
The night markets are still trashy and dirty. The streets are dirty like China. Ohhh but they look just like Shibuya in pictures. Nope. Look a little closer and you'll notice how dirty everything is.
Taiwan is not Japan. It doesn't have the money and the culture that Japan has. It's moving up, I'll give it that. It's a first world country these days, but at the bottom of the first world list.
>Dirty
Older, sure, but definitely not dirty. people throw their trash at home or keep it with them.
Night markets get greasy (it's fucking food cooked in the open, no shit), but it's not dirty.
>You're seriously fucking retarded if you think Taiwan is cheap Japan.
I don't get where you can't possibly think that. Even the better parts of China look more like Japan than any other place in the world, aside from maybe Korea and, well, Taiwan. You haven't been to Tokyo nor Taipei nor do you have a fucking business. You're a larper and you're making shit up, or you're extrapolating from what you may have seen in SEA.
>and the culture that Japan has
japan's culture at this point is being a shut in at your parent's place and killing yourself in a forest lol don't get me wrong it's better than north america but come on, it's a mid nation at this point for niche outsiders.
Taiwan is almost as rich as Korea but it acts and feels like no far off Vietnam, that's what I didn't get.
This. It's suppose to be rich but feels...poor.
It's basically discount Japan where everyone speaks Chinese.
That's what I like about it. The soul, cost, friendliness and community of a third world country but it's actually first world. Best of both
So how do KTVs work in Taiwan? Is it easy to get local girls to go to one with you?
>So how do KTVs work in Taiwan?
Legitimate KTVs? Go in, ask for a room, done. Call/book if it's fri/sat/sun, they are almost always fully booked on those days.
"KTVs"? Go in, pick a girl, go to your room.
>Is it easy to get local girls to go to one with you?
As in a random woman who just left her 996 office job? Someone you met through dating apps?
Can you pull? Are you attractive? Yes? No? There's your answer. What kind of answer are you expecting for such a question?
Just wondering how common those "KTV"s are and if they are accessible to foreigners. I'm guessing if they exist they're overpriced and have low quality girls.
Not him but no, the prostitutes are not worth it since it's easy to pull. Or go with friends. And there are ktvs everywhere. Literally google map it or go to partyworld in ximen.
If you really want to ruin yourself, go to Linsen north road. There you have ktv and ktv hostesses, but it's not cheap. Fucking degenerate.
It depends on the KTV. The cheap ones will have used up 30/40 year olds and the expensive ones will have model like 20 years old. You can choose the one you want. It's expensive for poorfags but if youre a richfag go for it.
Learning a language on an app is a meme. Get an actual textbook, take classes on italki or take online classes on YouTube.
Avoid Duolingo like the plague. it's fucking garbage for asian languages.
Is SOULpan as safe as Japan?
Also, do they have onsens?
Yes, and they have hot springs.
Bought a plane ticket to Taipei. It will be my first time in Asia and first solo travel. I've got a remote job and recently broke up with my girlfriend. It's going to be lonely, but what the heck, why not? Any tips to make the most of my stay anons? I could stay for up to three months.
Meet me at the Spring Onion Museum in Sanxing on December 15th
Thanks anons, I'd be happy to meet up. My email is [email protected]
I will unironically hang out with you if you want anon. Give me your email, discord or steam if you want to set something up.
which parts of taiwan have the best cutest taiwanese girls?
tainan, this is well known. tainan people consider themselves separate from the rest of taiwan, like they are a higher caste.
some of the lighter skin/thinner aboriginal ones are pretty cute. these are rare though. east coast.
>Thread on Taiwan
>Turns into deranged trumptards and glowmorons making up stories trying to smear China, a country they've never been to (because that would require leaving mommy's basement)
I want 4chan to be shut down so bad. Turned the entire site into a shitpit of shills, reddit retards and underaged children
Anki for the basics.
You can find lots of Chinese language content on youtube but only written in Chinese (Youtube censors and suppresses Chinese content)
There are tons of visual novels that you can find on steam in chinese as well once your vocabulary base is good enough.
HSK 1 Standard Course by Jiang Liping and then the rest of the course. all in pdf form. you can find them online, they were all on z-library but that is now gone.
What are the current restrictions? Still need to get tested or what?
you get 4 spit in a bottle tests which no one checks on. if you are positive within 7 days of arriving you are meant to isolate. masks required everywhere.
Taiwan looks interesting on streetview. Why are all the buildings the same height? Its like they decided nothing could be above or below 3 stories.
It kind of looks like a chinese wild west lol
China is definitely wayyyy more of a wild west than Taiwan.
>https://disp.cc/b/Gossiping/aq6E
>They already came, for some reason 80% white men I met in Taiwan have strong Beta/loser energy and are English Teachers. The 20% who isn't teachers are normals in tech or biz.
It's more of a 60/40 split than a 20/80. You just hang out with the shittier crowds. Most people do tech, biz, or have their own thing going on that isn't teaching. It's just that they're not from the anglo world and do not really give a fuck about interacting with you in general. They'd rather just do their thing with their people or focus on their work and family. They don't give a fuck about expat forums, they don't give a fuck about you or me, and the only expats they talk to are the ones they came with, or the guys from their block and that's it. A lot of them are around the northern parts of taipei, as well as xindian and yonghe. By the way, to the people reading this, these are the people you should know about if you're planning something long term. Not your TEFL retard who's just having the time of his life and will leave in 2 years anyway.
As for the retard from ptt, they come here every year. And every year, they get called out and some are actually lynched. I remember one of these retard got doxxed and people were waiting at the hotel where he stayed to confront him and he basically spent the rest of his trip hiding like a bitch lmao.
>Taipei is homo'd because some retards meme'd a puppet as a president. I'm going to meme the other parties to take out Tsai.
There's nothing homo about Taiwan, most of its people are very conservative. The gay marriage thing is a red herring, same for a couple of crappy thing they try to pass. The KMT will literally never pass so long as they don't have a platform that isn't about openly sucking PRC cock and progressively get isolated.
The rest of what you said is retarded and now I regret answering you.
>xindian and yonghe
any good neighbourhoods/ares around mrt stations to check out in those districts? i'd only ever been to banqiao in new taipei and spend all my time in taipei city on the short times i was there.
There's a nice night market and streets around nanshijiao and the bitan section of the river park is worth visiting.
Then again those are suburbs. You won't find something interesting there. People go there to sleep.
Man I got so sick of seeing those stupid crane games everywhere. Rarely did they even have any prizes worth trying to win
Taiwan is STILL doing covid shit lol
Like what? Everything is open now and no one asks for proof of shots
Mandatory Masks
Anyone can tell me if I need to register before traveling for that arrival cap? I am from a visa free country.
Arrival cap is managed by the airlines. If you can book a flight then you can go
Thx for the info
I'm 24 and just got a Chinese gf after a series of misguided relationships and careless cooming. This girl is incredibly sweet, innocent, frugal, open minded, and responsible, but something feels like it's missing... Maybe it's because she's not dramatic, mentally ill, badass, has asian zoomer tier housekeeping skills, and/or is not overly confident... Despite only being 24, I've decided to continue with it and not sabotage my own potential happiness. Happiness from cooming was becoming increasingly diminished, being adulterous was getting difficult and pathetic, and while mentally ill women make life feel kino they are way too stressful after the honeymoon phase. My gf doesn't speak fluent English but I hope she improves over time. I am learning mandarin because why wouldn't I in this situation? My brain is finally maturing
Based. Despite what some zoomies will tell you, you can't keep cooming forever. Men hit a wall too.
What is your experience with stable, monogamous relationships?
I'm gonna continue writing because maybe this will resonate with some of you out there, and I do not want to attend therapy just so some Stacy with a graduate degree can know all of my secrets including inflicted and self inflicted traumas. It's a long and ugly list.
I saw a mom, dad and kid at the store last week. The mom was the innocent but very dumb and oblivious type of person. She was shopping for boots and the dad asked her why she needed them. "Well, for walking around and walking in the park". The dad expressed some grimace but said alright. Meanwhile, the kid was sitting on the floor shouting some incomprehensible words. After some time, the dad was sitting down, bend over with palms over his face mutter "we're gonna be here forever". He explained to her it was 5pm on a Friday after work and that he didn't want to be there. I knew his life was hellish because he chose some geriatric woman to mother his child. It was another reminder to choose a partner carefully
We all just want the best for ourselves. It's a hard balance to strike. Does she make enough money to make me not feel like wish granting services? Is she going to still be my looksmatch at 40? Is she going to be totally useless at cooking and housekeeping forcing me redo half assed attempts. For some reason, teaching women how to open tin cans, open blinds, put on bed sheets, and write coherent paragraphs is something I continue to do with partners I find. It confuses the hell out of me - which straw ought to snap the fuck out of the camels back? Is having a child wife okay is she's always learning what you teach her?
These probably aren't questions well adjusted men face because they just choose an okay-looking normie but if anyone has remarks, they'd be interesting to hear
All I can say is don't fuck it up
I had that once then let her go, thots won't replace a good woman.
I'll be in Taiwan for a couple of weeks in December. Recommendations on what to do in southern Taiwan?
After checking out Taipei and Jioufen, I'm thinking of heading south to Hualien and doing the Zhuilu Old Trail. I also want to catch the train up to Alishan, but don't know where else to visit on the way there. Is Sun Moon Lake worth a day trip?
And then I don't really have anything else planned. Not even sure it's worth heading all the way to Kenting, given it'll be winter...
Suggestions welcome!
>Zhuilu Old Trail
rather you than me. i've climbed many mountains but i don't like being that close to the edge.
When they first carved out the trail from the cliff side it was only 30cms wide! At least there's ropes along the cliff now.
Yeah, I'm still undecided if I'll head south via the west or east coast, but if it's the latter I'll definitely check out Yilan. I heard the hot springs are good there.
Thanks for the heads up. Leaning towards heading through Yilan for sure now. Will look into Keelung as well. What were your favourite things to do there?
Yeah, I might skip the south as well if I can't fit in everything else I wanna do in the north as I only have 2 weeks to play with.
I remember cycling from Taidong to Hualien, easy if you rent a bike. The east coast of Taiwan has really nice nature.
Sun Moon Lake is touristy but worth it if you get a bike for the day.
Yilan is close to Taipei and it's nice can be visited as a day trip
Jiufen is overrated and expensive. It's very crowded and it only looks good by night, and then you'll get bored pretty quickly. If you have some time, Yilan and the rice fields surrounding it are an absolute sight to behold since there is no rice and it's a basically a giant mirror made of water. I went to a hotel there with a bath that is a giant square hole. Very comfy. the city itself gives off third world country vibes but it's still pretty clean and the food is nice.
Also, keelung is worth going to from taipei, just take the bus by 6 at taipei city hall and go back with the last line (or go by train from main station).
As for the south, i guess kenting and tainan worth a shot. But i quite frankly prefer the north of taiwan, except in summer.
outside mask mandate is stopped from December 1. still required on metro and inside most places, unless singing or toasting.
What would you recommend checking out in Taichung? National Theater? Museum of Fine Arts?
I'm going to visit the National Museum of Natural history, if you want to meet me there. Also, Xinshe Sea of Flowers will make for a nice day trip.
I'll be in Taichung from the 11th to the 15th of December. My email here:
Would it be worthwhile spending a couple of nights in Taoyuan when I arrive or is it a wasteland compared to Taipei?
no, it's an industrial city
nothing to see there
Taoyuan is not interesting at all. Taipei and Kaohsiung are the only cities worth getting accomodation for more than a day.
The rest you can get to by train quickly from either of these cities. Possibly, if cities aren't your thing and you love hiking, give Yilan and Hualien a shot. Hualien is the most advertised but Yilan has a really cool feel to it. especially the rice field area
Thanks, anon. What do you think of Taichung? I booked 4 nights there cause it seems pretty interesting.
Jesus christ, 4 nights ? Two would've been more than enough. Once you do the nightmarket taichung doesnt have much to show. Can't even go to the beach since it's winter.
I fell for the slowtravel meme and will be working remotely. Also, a cutie who lives there wants to show me around. Hotel prices are better in Taichung than Taipei also.
What's good in Kaohsiung?
Generally speaking, what are some places in Taiwan you'd recommend to a sinophile? If I visit Taiwan I really wanna feel like I'm visiting China.
I'm going to go see the purple crow butterflies in Maolin, if you want to tag along
dragon & tiger pagodas
fo guang shan buddha museum
guandimiao
xinzhuang tianhou temple
What's the score with renting a motorbike there? As easy as other SEA countries, i.e. don't have to bother with paperwork etc.?
Duuuude you gotta get that shit you can get delivered where you pick a bunch of meats and veggies and even fruit and candy and they batter it and deep fry it like tempura and put it in a paper bag and you eat it with a big toothpick. That shit is the best drunk food ever. Forget what it's called but some slut I picked up suggested it when I was drunk and said I was tired of eating healthy shit
Would any trv anons in Taipei be interested in a beer ? I am struggling to make bros
I'd be up for a beer. I'm arriving on Friday, but I'll most likely be jet-lagged. I've shared my email earlier in the thread. What's your experience like so far?
Pretty good, some bad experiences with grills though.
As in, they were not receptive to your autistic advances?
I speak Chinese so dating is easy
My issue is more trying to avoid the BPD chicks that try to ruin your life because something they dreamed up that morning.
>avoid the BPD chicks
have fun trying that in Taiwan
So what can I see there?
It is very intriguing to see it before the chinese will btfo the whole stuff, and I found some great tickets and accomodiation for a good price, but when I google what to see I get average shit
What's the healthcare like in Taiwan? I was thinking of getting Lasik. Would that be a terrible idea? Or should I get it for cheaper in Thailand?
Ah yes, definitely go to thailand. It's not like eye surgery is something risky that might ruin your life if you cut corners when it comes to it. And yes, i know about lasik surgery and how "safe" it is.
Seriously though, while taiwan has relatively good and modern healthcare sometimes it feels fucking archaic. If you don't know the doctor and doesnt come recommended, avoid at all costs.
I can't tell if youre being sarcastic or not about Thailand. Lots of people go there for medical tourism (most famously ladyboys, but also lasik). I don't know if it's any better or worse than Taiwan for that stuff. I just assume from stereotypes that the northern Asian types in Taiwan would be better doctors than the jungle Asians in Thailand.
The general rule when it comes to high risk surgeries is to get whoever has the most experience in this. Another factor to consider is the presence of some kind of standard or regulating body that would make sure the practice isn't trying to fuck you over. If you have both, then go ahead, even if it's in Ghana.
I'm being sarcastic in the sense that you're trying to get something risky at a cheap price. Trannies go to thailand not for the cheap price but for the ridiculous experience the surgeons have in there. fake tits and boob removal is something they are adept at.
besides, Lasik in thailand has similar prices as in the US, look it up. I think i'd rather do it in a country where the surgeon has the additional incentive of not wanting to be sued for a botched job
calling it "high risk" is an exaggeration. Yeah it's not 100% safe, but no surgery is. It's not like I'm looking for open-heart surgery or something. They basically just strap you in and push a button on the machine.
>besides, Lasik in thailand has similar prices as in the US, look it up
roughly half the price as the US from what I'm seeing ($3000 in Thailand vs $6000 in US). Taiwan is like that too. India would be cheaper. Of course the price varies massively depending on what procedure you get and whether they're quoting you the real price or some scam where they hit you with extra fees at the end.
I wouldn't go to Taiwan for LASIK, Anon. When I was living there, their medical facilities were decent for acute visits (colds, flus, things of that nature) but it always takes forever and is overwhelmed with every old fuck with an ache and pain. I'm fairly certain the old-timers would go check-in for a made-up illness/injury so that they could sit in the air-conditioned waiting room, I shit you not. Oh, and the credentials of the doctors there are questionable at best.
This Anon is also correct:
Medicine in taiwan is ridiculous to say the least. They go there for literally anything and everything and the doctor prescribes indecent and ludicrous amount of everytthing and anything you want except painkillers. They giveaway benzos like it's fucking candy, and antibiotics are basically otc and they prescribe them at every turn as if you were a caged chicken.
Seriously, my ex gf went to the doctor and had fucking antibiotics given to her for her fucking flu. Got a burn ? Here's an antibiotic cream. Acne ? Have some fucidin.
You don't want to deal with doctors in Asia in general. If it's not ridiculously dogmatic and ideologically driven like TCM, they just don't give a fuck about you.