Student Union
Building Skills and Friends Through Language Exchange
This summer I was fortunate enough to spend a couple of months in Taipei, Taiwan studying Mandarin Chinese at the International Chinese Language Program. It was a great experience and probably one my best summers ever – meeting new people, exploring a new place, and really improving my Chinese through intensive study.
Some of my cooler experiences from Taiwan involved language exchanges with local friends. I met with two Taipei residents, Angela and Lynn, separately usually once a week, and we would alternate between English and Mandarin conversation for a couple of hours.
It turns out that language exchange is a pretty common practice at National Taiwan University (NTU), where my language program was located. The language center on campus had tons of flyers from people seeking exchange partners, as did the bulletin board in the lobby of my dormitory (although it was actually a mutual friend who initially introduced me to Angela and Lynn).
According to Angela, who completed her undergraduate degree at NTU, language exchange has become especially popular in the last few years as the campus internationalized. She expressed disappointment that she could find comparatively few Chinese-English language exchange opportunities at her university in London. At George Washington University, where I go to school in the U.S., the opportunities for language exchanges are also pretty scarce. I’ve seen the occasional flyer advertising them on bulletin boards around campus, but there isn’t the same culture of language exchange that I found in Taipei.
For Angela and Lynn, there were a lot of different reasons for pursuing a language exchange with a native English speaker. On a practical level, for Angela it was a way to maintain her oral English, since she had recently returned from a year in England. She also wanted help going over the finer points of her MA thesis draft, so we devoted a lot of our English conversation time to that.
For Lynn it was a way to practice her spoken English before leaving at the end of August to work in Hong Kong for a year. She wanted to prepare herself for working in an English-language environment, especially having never studied or worked abroad before.
On my side, language exchange was a way to practice Chinese with a native speaker and someone familiar with the country. Our meetings were a nice break from the classroom environment, and we could chat casually about a range of topics. I found it helpful for picking up the common parlance that I didn’t really get from standardized Chinese textbooks and about which I didn’t always have the opportunities to ask my instructors. It was also free, whereas finding a private tutor in Taipei can be very expensive (compared to when I lived on mainland China, where I never would have done language exchange because tutors were so cheap).
Getting together for language exchange was also a way to branch out and explore different places. Usually I’d meet Angela and Lynn at a coffee shop or tea house close to campus or near the train station, but sometimes we would try to mix things up. One Tuesday for example, Lynn suggested that we see the university's symphony orchestra perform at the national concert hall, since she was a former orchestra member herself and knew many people involved in the show. One Sunday morning, instead of doing our usual thing at Starbucks, I met Angela near the Taipei 101 skyscraper and she showed me around a famous local bookstore after we finished our exchange.
On the other hand, because it was so undisciplined and unstructured, language exchange wasn’t nearly as efficient as learning Chinese in the classroom. It also would have been pretty difficult to fit into our schedules if the three of us had not been so free this summer, since each session took a long time, and half of that time was just chatting in my native language. Since language exchange is so informal, I think a lot depends on the rapport that you develop with your partner. If you can’t carry an enjoyable conversation together, then motivation and enthusiasm for getting together might fade pretty quickly.
Now that I’m back home in the U.S., I’m glad that I tried my hand at language exchange this summer. I feel like I gained something from it, although I also think in the end the benefits were more social and about experiencing new things than they were about improving my Chinese language. For Angela and Lynn, being from Taipei and already settled in the area, their goals were much more focused on the language-learning aspect. I’m not sure if language exchange is something that I’ll continue to seek out now that I’m back in the U.S., since I’m much busier here, but it’s something I’ll keep my mind open too depending on what comes up.
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Industry analysts say the negative trend is mainly due to higher costs amid China’s struggling economy, with a growing number of students going to less expensive countries like Australia and Britain, and tense ties between Washington and Beijing.
The number of foreign students studying in the U.S. in 2022-23 passed 1 million for the first time since the COVID pandemic, said Open Doors, an information resource on international students and scholars.
While the U.S. saw a nearly 12% total increase year-on-year for that period, the number of international students from China, its top source, fell by 0.2% to 289,526.
That’s 600 fewer students than the 2021-22 academic year, when their numbers dropped by nearly 9%. The COVID pandemic saw Chinese student numbers drop in 2020-21 by nearly 15%, in line with the world total drop.
While it’s not yet clear if the drop is a leveling out or a fluctuating decline, analysts say China’s struggling economy and the high cost of studying in the U.S. are the main reasons for the fall in student numbers.
Vincent Chen, a Chinese study abroad consultant based in Shanghai, said although most of his clients are still interested in studying in the U.S., there is a clear downward trend, while applicants for Anglophone universities in Australia and Britain have been increasing.
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The British Council said three to four years of undergraduate tuition in Britain starts as low as $15,000.
The number of Chinese students in Britain was 154,260 in 2022-23, according to the U.K. Higher Education Statistics Agency, HESA, up from 121,145 in the 2018/19 academic year.
Australia’s Home Affairs office said in the 2023-24 program year, China was the top source foreign country for new student visa grants at 43,389, up slightly (1.5%) from the previous year.
Chen said Chinese state media's negative portrayal of the United States and concerns about discrimination have also contributed to the shift.
Bruce Zhang, a Chinese citizen who received his master's degree in Europe after studying in China, told VOA Mandarin he had such an incident occur to him after he was admitted to a U.S. university’s Ph.D. program.
When he entered Boston's Logan International Airport last year, Zhang said customs officers questioned him for more than an hour about his research, and if it had any links to the military, and took his computer and mobile phone for examination.
"Fortunately, I had heard that U.S. customs might be stringent in inspecting Chinese students, so I had relatively few study-related data and documents on my personal computer," he said.
Zhang was allowed to enter the U.S. for his studies in materials science, but the questioning left him so rattled that he has encouraged other Chinese to study elsewhere.
Cui Kai, a study abroad consultant in Massachusetts told VOA Mandarin that experiences like Zhang’s or worse happen for a reason.
"Students who were questioned or their visas were revoked at the customs are usually those who completed their undergraduate studies in China and come to the U.S. for a master's or doctoral degree in a sensitive major," said Cui.
Former President Donald Trump signed Proclamation 10043 in June 2020, prohibiting visas for any Chinese student who “has been employed by, studied at, or conducted research at or on behalf of, an entity in the PRC that implements or supports the PRC's “military-civil fusion strategy.”
The U.S. says China has been using students and scholars to gain access to key technology and, under Proclamation 10043, revoked more than 1,000 visas issued to Chinese nationals and has denied thousands more.
Critics say the policy is costly to the U.S. and is encouraging Chinese students to look to European and other universities.
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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