INSTRUMENTS IN TAIWAN
台湾人对乐器的看法

As the project comes to a close, overall I think I did fairly well on my videos. I have learnt a lot from this project, much more than I would have if I had just googled everything. In the end I think it was fun to go out and ask real people, which help bring the project to life.

​

This project has helped me broaden my horizons and made me realize how shallow my thinking was at the start of this. I had wrong assumption after wrong assumption shattered time after time.

​

The first assumption I had broken was about musical notation. Growing up in Canada learning music, I was only exposed to one form of musical notation. I couldn’t dream up another way of writing down music. So when I came here and discovered Jianpu, my mind was completely blown.

​

This prompted me to dig a little deeper to learn how to read it, and to my surprise it was surprisingly easy to learn, maybe even easier to learn than Western notation. I remember when I first started read music how I would write in either numbers or the letters of each note in my music until I memorized which place was which on the staff was which pitch. The special marks in Jianpu were also amazingly intuitive, for example if there was a dot below a number, it meant the note below the main range.

​

The second assumption I had blown away was about the popularity of traditional instruments in Taiwan. It was almost comparable to the bagpipes in Canada. It’s not completely mainstream, and they each have their own niche that they occupy, albeit traditional instruments have a larger pocket than the bagpipes.

​

The third assumption I had shattered was on how instruments were classified which were completely different from the West. It reminded me of the time where I learnt that traditionally in China there were 5 elements, instead of the 4 main elements you hear about in Western Culture.

​

Before I came here, I had the notion of being fairly open-minded, but one hardly notices their own assumptions until it gets pointed out or broken, and I had forgotten that. This trip has really helped me open up my mind and strive to look at alternative views, and search for answers along the less explored path.

​

I think this project also helped with a lot with just learning Chinese. Since the topics of the project were pretty open ended, there was a good chance we talked about something that wasn’t exactly involved in the textbook. It made us go out there and learn new things.

The study-abroad program has taught me so much about Taiwan’s culture. When you learn Mandarin in a classroom, it is a really isolated environment and you never really get to hear how actual people speak the language. Otherwise when you speak, your speech sounds rigid, formal and sometimes confusing. Going out into Taiwan and immersing yourself in the culture helps you speak and learn better.

​

我觉得来台湾以前我的发音不太好。但是来台湾以后，我觉得我的发音变了越来越好因为在温哥华我们没听过字那么多。只听老师和小老师说话。跟同学们说中文的时候，我们不知道我们的发音这么样。在台湾，我们会听到很多的句子。听句子会帮我们的发音变越来越好。