[My Students] Derrick Hurst's Comment

I studied Mandarin with Peter for just over a year, and found him to be not only an excellent and rigorous teacher, but also an informative ambassador to help me navigate, understand, and appreciate the culture of Taiwan.

I moved to Taiwan from California in 2012 to work for a Taiwanese company. All of my coworkers spoke Mandarin, and the business was all done in Mandarin. While I could get along without it, clearly I needed to learn the language to succeed in the job.

When I first found Peter, I had been taking classes at a local university to learn basic Mandarin. The class format wasn’t working well for me because I was traveling a lot for work and missing lessons along the way. I started interviewing individual tutors that could be more flexible with their schedule. My first impression of Peter was that he is a serious, hardworking tutor, and he would encourage me to be the same as a student. This impression proved immediately to be correct. His lessons followed a framework set up by the most popular series of Mandarin learning books, but went far beyond with weekly written lessons teaching context and language about real-world events, places, and things that would immediately be useful to me at work and out in the world. The combination of the two, along with Peter’s always-available readiness answer questions quickly started opening doors for me and helping me understand the new culture in which I was living. My language skills increased so rapidly that supervisor at work would proudly show off my spoken and written language to his friends and clients.

As I continued to work with Peter, our relationship grew larger than the simple teacher/student arrangement we started with. His openness and enthusiasm led us out of the classroom and into sharing experiences in the real world. We would try out different coffee shops and practice our language there, he would tell me about unique cultural sites and events to visit, and sometimes visit them together. In a moment of truly unique cultural blending, he invited me to join him and his friends at a local Taipei professional baseball game. It was an amazing experience to see the game, so rich in American tradition, played out with the same rules but a completely different set of traditions in the grandstands. A great deal of fun to discuss the differences of American games vs. Taiwanese games. I hope to be able to return the favor one day and take Peter to a game here in the USA.
I’ve moved back to the USA now, profoundly changed from my time living abroad as anyone would be. Looking back at it as I often do, I can clearly see the two different experiences- before I started working with Peter the culture seemed opaque and the simplest exchanges with people was riddled with misunderstanding and difficulty. After meeting Peter, things started making senses, people opened up, and life became a whole lot easier. I give him so much credit for working hard, pushing me, and having patience and diligence to help me understand how and why to speak the local language. I hope he has the opportunity to share that experience with many, many more students and colleagues.

Derrick Hurst

Dh.hurst@gmail.com

老外學中文 什麼地方最痛苦？

http://www.epochtimes.com.tw/n141750/%E8%80%81%E5%A4%96%E5%AD%B8%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87-%E4%BB%80%E9%BA%BC%E5%9C%B0%E6%96%B9%E6%9C%80%E7%97%9B%E8%8B%A6-.html

What They Say[學生說法]

http://petersonsu.blogspot.tw/search/label/What%20They%20Say%5B%E5%AD%B8%E7%94%9F%E8%AA%AA%E6%B3%95%5D

「老外」的發問：為什麼臺灣人不會叫日本人「老外」？

https://www.thenewslens.com/article/15518