(Featured image was taken during the last time I was in Taiwan. The picture is of Mt. Jilong and the photo was taken at Teapot Mountain).

Hi everyone, I am Matt Geason and I am a graduate student in the MA Asian Studies program at George Washington University. Currently, I am taking part in the Sigur Center Asian Language Study Grant. I sought out this opportunity to further improve my Mandarin Chinese ability to help prepare me for a potential career path at the Department of State. Because of COVID-19, I decided to take part in a language study program online through National Taiwan Normal University’s Mandarin Training Center (MTC). I have previously studied at MTC when I was studying Chinese in 2016 and had a positive experience in class and with the teaching staff.

For my current course of study, I am working 1-on-1 with a Chinese language instructor where I am focusing on speaking, listening, and I have a significant focus on reading. Additionally, this type of program has a customized syllabus where before the start of classes my teacher and I discussed the learning objectives, and proper material was allocated for the course of study. These customized learning objectives have greatly helped improve on areas of Chinese where I may have struggled more in the past but see significant improvement now. This is my first experience working intensively in a 1-on-1 environment and I think that there are considerable benefits to this, for example, my teacher and I have established a repour with one another and I think that this type of working relationship goes far to support my language studies. I believe that this is true because my teacher has been able to easily identify certain grammatical structures or vocabulary usage that is inconsistent and can target them and relate them with others I am stronger with to help me improve further.

Since classes started just a few weeks ago I feel my Chinese ability has steadily increased. The homework assignments involving news articles and short stories have challenged me to learn more characters and phrases at a much faster rate. Plus, at the start of each class, I give a short presentation regarding a recent news article. This is a new type of regular assignment that I am not used to from other Chinese courses that I have taken. This type of assignment requires researching an article, time spent understanding the article, and preparation for the in-class presentation and has helped me master new vocabulary and helped build my confidence in discussing new material. Additionally, outside of class, my teacher has assigned me Chinese Language TV shows to watch that I access through Netflix to also practice my listening ability and also learn more about how the language is used outside of the classroom.

In all the first few weeks of my course of study have been a lot of work but it has been very enjoyable being able to dedicate so much time to further my Chinese language ability. I am looking forward to the weeks ahead in my course of study and the further language advancement that I will be able to make.