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right, thank you :) did this video answer some of the questions or concerns you had about teaching overseas?

@@stevenslanguagevlog Yes for sure. Avoid the Delta, and go for the Master's degree if I want to make this a career.

😂😂😂 Just know why you're doing the DELTA instead of a Master's. The reading list they provide is still useful! 😎

加油朋友！

And also, can you make a video of the job of teaching English in China please? How tough is it really, are you in front of a group of people talking for 6 hours a day?

Beijing and Shanghai would be most expensive, but if you're coming here to save money, you can find cheaper places to live but you'll also make less money. Quite a few people I know have moved down to ChongQing or GuangZhou for cost of living and work opportunities as well. As for the visa application, yes it's a bit of work and something you'd have to check with your local Chinese embassy. You need a visa which needs to be sponsored which can only be done when you've been offered a contract. It doesn't have to be a company, but it does have to be your employer. And once you're in the country on that visa, you'll need to switch it over and do a whole host of over things... but your employer should help you with all of that. If you're thinking of coming over here on a 144-hour visa free layover to look for a job, ya, you could try it and check the place out, but you'd still need to go through the same application process as if you were applying from the comfort of your own home.

I don't deal with class rooms any more as I do primarily private client work, and I have no desire to return to classroom teaching any time soon. The ESL market got slammed a few years back when the government implemented its double reduction policy, effectively curtailing who could teach where, when, how and what. It's become a lot more strict in the sense that it's not as easy to find an entry-level job, but that also means that a lot of sketchy employers have left the market as well. Nowadays, for teaching English specifically, you'd be looking at international schools (which require proper education certification... but some schools will train you in that if you sign a contract for a couple of years) or universities. There are some private schools that are separate from the international schools, but nothing on the scale of the JET program in Japan or EPIK program in Korea. Taiwan might have a public school program still running, but I'm not sure. I found my first in China by going to Wikipedia and looking up universities in China and then cold emailing the ones I was interested in. You could try the same to see if it works.

Finally, as for teaching itself, if you do go that route, then yes you would often be standing in front of a class for 6 to 8 hours a day teaching your subject. I only taught at the university level so that's what I mostly know. It was 30+ students per class, three groups in one program with another two groups in another program. Some were going to the US to study, others to the UK. ALL were focused on passing either TOEFL or IELTS, NONE cared what it took. LOTS of memorization and "Yes, teacher, I'll learn it," followed by copied work. The kids who work hard will be tough to inform that they aren't A+'s because at some point you'll have to reconcile your grading rubrics with the work they turn in. That is to say, the kids who work will be really good, but the administration might ask you to curve the grades. Heartbreaking, but the popular meme of "An A- is a failure for an Asian student" still rings somewhat true. That's not to say all kids will be A+'s, nor will they care, but your job is to at least try to get them to learn something so they pass some test.

@@stevenslanguagevlog thank you for the reply Steven. Its rumored that you can be on a bullet train in China, order food with your cell phone, and someone will jump on your train at the next stop, and hand the food to you. Out of the hundreds of youtube videos, I have only seen that filmed once. It would be cool if you filmed that. :)

Thanks for the sub!

That would be interesting as I don’t play video games at all. I’ve reduced myself to watching other “old guys” play through classic games on the NES instead! I honestly wouldn’t even know how to install the game nor if my machine would handle it. Are you playing it?

@@stevenslanguagevlog I'm not. Something else you can do is watch someone else play it and comment on the language.

And yet I see a lot of US travellers not blurring the faces in their videos so I’m at a loss. One reason I blurred these faces is in case someone somewhere gets the idea to go talk to these people cause, yknow, they talked to “that foreigner”.

I'd agree as the language exchange becomes a lot more transactional in nature than in learning the language itself. I guess it depends on whether you're travelling TO LEARN the language or simply to visit the place that USES the language.

Motivation for sure, still hugely embarrassing to stand in front of someone trying to say the right word only to say something completely different! But yea people are generally willing to help out and all the better if they're used to an international crowd that they would be able to explain something about the language in a way that's easy to grasp.

well she did post it online and left it ambiguous as to what was going on.

@@stevenslanguagevlog Aye. Just saying I miss the days when it wasn't so easy to post stuff and get flamed or start one.

Yea, something that seems so innocent can then get blown out of proportion. And all for what?

yes... which is what I say in the video.

@@stevenslanguagevlogyou said nothing in your explanation about the girl or goose being pretty/valuable unless you count the goose meat part, but it feels like that part is more taking about the guy rather uplifting the girl. The comment above yours definitely helped me understand it better. Not trying to be rude just trying to honestly explain things, I know sometimes the internet can morph tones so I wanted to make that clear.

What?

very true... spoken like an experienced language learner!

I agree, I think it rings true for most languages that the ability to skim is already a bit more advanced and not "clingy" to looking up everything in a dictionary.

a lot of it is Western propaganda, but there are some places that would be more sceptical of a foreigner than others, especially as you get further away from the big cities. In terms of day to day safety, the biggest threat is your privacy, but not from the overseeing cameras, from the people on the street who love to snap pictures and videos of foreigners around town for no other reason than simple curiosity. Duly noted, I can cover this more in a video.

@@stevenslanguagevlog thanks for the honest response look forward to the video!

completely doable

Lol I can try. They aren’t the best smelling places. 😂

I couldn't get into it, I felt like I forced my way through it.

sounds neat. Things you only realize when you study another language!

Also if you have critical thinking skills… they scanned their account to rent the bike, they need to return bike to stop the charge. They will make sure bike is parked back otherwise their account will continued to be charged. Really no sense to make this “social credit score” argument

Yeap, along with Butter Beer, lots of wands, and free shows to watch.

I guess in a large way, movies and their associated industry play a huge role in spreading culture. A place like Hollywood, for all its follies, is quite accepting of anything that can be entertaining, cultured, or not.

@@stevenslanguagevlog And they usually reflect the culture of the time even if they don't mean to

Wasn't bad, ignoring the cost (and appreciating the safety and cleanliness of the park), I'd say it was worth it.

Thank you :)

Not sure how that implies any sort of freedom, and I'm also wondering if this is what you like to do in your own time and place?

@@stevenslanguagevlog Yes, absolutely. I am Taiwanese. I am actively involved in finding housing, employment, and cultural integration for refugees fleeing the CCP (most recently from Hong Kong). So, yes, I actually physically do indeed engage in this sort of activity. Very regularly.

@@wordscapes5690 IN short, an anti-China troll LOL

@@tweedy4sg Sigh. Yes, you found me. I’m just an anti Ch8na troll. Fine.

I kinda get the sense that a lot of English (especially in ESL) education is sort of stuck in their old ways, especially the testing system. What would you like to see happen or change?

@stevenslanguagevlog I don't know about where you live, but here in Algeria, the things you learn in middle school and high school are in my opinion repetitive (I don't know if they changed the curriculum), and when I finally got to uni, you could imagine my disappointment when I was taught what a verb is, when I was looking forward to enhancing my English and becoming cultured, that was for the first year anyway, I believe it gets better on the third year, where we study literature, history, ESP, and linguistics in depth, and actually get to use critical thinking in tests and evaluations, so instead of having the repetitive evaluations thay students could predict, i was for once challenged and God did it feel good, so to answer your question, the changes that I'd like to see is to put the things I studied on my third year in the first year of uni along with the critical thinking evaluation so my country could actually get a proper educated individual at the end of the day. I know this is a very superficial answer for the depth of the question, but I believe it's a good start for not just my country, but a lot others

Interesting, I appreciate you taking the time to explain. I honestly can't remember much from the grammar lessons in my grade school, but I do remember one class where we had to underline the subject and predicate, but to this day I can't remember what else we had to learn. As for the relative "lateness" of studying literature, history, etc, that you mentioned, I wonder if the university was dealing with a situation that students would come from across the country and they needed to be bought up onto the same level playing field before moving onto the arguably more complicated and nuanced discussions of linguistics and ESP, among others. I have no idea about Algeria, but in Canada the first couple of years of university are sort of a "free for all" in that you can choose just about any subjects you want to study across the disciplines before committing to a major. Exceptions were given to Law, Engineering and Medicine, if students so chose. That meant that a lot of first and second year classes could be populated by students who were there just trying things out instead of continuing on with their specialization. Maybe that's already getting off topic already but may be one reason why some education institutions have to push back the more in depth courses.

@stevenslanguagevlog I don't think it has to do with any situation since in Algeria, our major is decided by how much we get in the baccalaureate exam, which is on the last year of high school (we get a list of majors and we get to choose six if I remember correctly, and then the system chooses one of the six so basically you could be studying something you don't like), now that I think about it, perhaps the reason they teach the basics in the first two years could be because some students who didn't choose English major got it anyway because of the system. I do like how you get the time to choose what suits you most but doesn't it feel like a waste of a few years of your life when you could have pre-chosen your major right after high school?

so are you preparing, or do you think it might not happen?

@@stevenslanguagevlog I feel that my days of soaking up languages have long past me by. My Welsh is okay, and I could get by in French (neither are gonna be useful in the future though). On the plus side, my niece started learning mandarin 6 months ago, and she's already way better than I ever could be (and she's 4).

Good to know! Thanks!

You think the apostrophe will last? I would think "its" would take over or "itz" because it's less hassle to select on a touch screen.

@@stevenslanguagevlog that makes sense, but i still think it would. People use it incorrectly, going out of their way to type in the unnecessary apostrophes.

Finger taps haha, I'd like to see how that will work. Emojis I certainly can see, possibly with Chinese characteristics??? And about those TikTok videos, what if there was a pill or something someone could take that would seem to slow down time but only in thought, thus, that one second video could be a whole semester of class hours??

@@stevenslanguagevlog Thus why people ab-you-se ADHD medicine. But with neural implants it's probably instant download. And Chinese would be too complicated. Simple smiley faces

And then... en? en. En? En en. And China will contribute the character 嗯 for this purpose ;)

Thank you :) Proper respect to you for learning English well, cause I don't think I've ever really progressed very far in many of the languages I've studied. What would you say was the tipping point in your own studies? Either the decision to keep going or was there a time you were thinking "Nah, this is it. I'm done.'?

@@stevenslanguagevlog It's really been about interest and life events. English and Swedish are mandatory languages, we have to learn them in school and by the time we graduate high school our English should be around C1 and Swedish around B1 if you know CEFR levels. I had a lot of interest in learning English because of movies, media, and video games, but Swedish not really. Coupled with the complex emotions that come from every reason for why we have to learn Swedish in schools instead of say a Sami language (~2% of population) or Karelian (~2%) or Finnish Sign Language (~2% of population plus many who would benefit because becoming deaf as people age is a thing) goes back to "We used to be colonized by Sweden like 200 years ago and they were the upper class when Finns were second class citizens, so now we have a rich minority of Swedish speaking Finns (5% of population) that we have to cater to and they literally have a political party just so they can keep Swedish as a mandatory language and the second official language of Finland." The the others were optional, some even fully self taught because not every school teaches every language: Finnish Sign Language was a language of necessity for a while, I struggled with selective mutism which is an anxiety disorder, basically a malffunctioning fight or flight response, specifically a freeze response which is the "play dead" option so it freezes the ability to speak and produce sound with the mouth. Mine was luckily mild enough that I could use my hands to sign a little bit or write, and once I got into therapy and healed my anxiety and trauma my selective mutism also got better, so it has been slowly degrading. It used to be B2 level for me. French was pure interest in the culture, got classes but there were only two of us students including me and the teacher, who happened to be a bit of a perfectionist. Quit after finishing the course and never looked back and can't utter a single sentence of French without meticulously making sure it's perfect, so there is a fear response associated with the language thanks ti the teacher. Japanese was also pure interest in culture, plus if we passed the course we could go on a trip to Japan. I wanted on that trip for the food and the temples and I made it. After that, I just got busy studying for my A-levels/end of high school exams so I just didn't have time for it and it fizzled out. And now I'm studying Portuguese because I got a Portuguese friend and language helps connect. We both can soeak English with each other, but something is always lost when it's no one's native language and she is learning Finnish. I'm going to get my Portuguese to a stable level and then pick up Ukrainian for my Ukrainian friend. So don't worry about it, following the dopamine is perfectly fine if you're learning languages just for fun.

I wouldn't say overly political, but yea a gentle reminder that you don't need a lot of money to learn. Maybe I'm overly optimistic on the message delivered and maybe it is a warning to the wealthy to not neglect the traditional schooling and its associated system. It was a comedy, so it was good for a laugh, but there were some words I didn't know since they were either plays on words or something that required a familiarity with how families and the education system work in order to understand.

Bit of a stretch there but I understand your point, and the fact that the family portrayed in the movie still has the movie just in case they need. In one sense, the movie shows the opulence the grandparents can afford because they had worked hard, while on the other it shows that the parents need to raise their kid so they learn the value of work.

yes I did, and yes others have translated famous brand names. Part of learning a language is understanding when a character is being used on its own and as part of a larger word, which can be difficult for someone who is making their way the Chinese language.

@@stevenslanguagevlog I respectfully disagree. Brand names need no translation, especially for beginners, it only confuses them. Please tell me how you translate Sony or Kia, don’t tell me it’s 索尼， 起亚. Those are not translations, those are transcriptions. Morning/dawn color for 朝彩is transliteration, not translation either. Sony and Kia themselves are anglicized words to begin with.

Thanks!

indeed!

So useful (and easier than in Open Office).