An exciting moment has come, we are starting to teach Taiwanese / Hokkien online group classes from the 15th of November onwards.
We will be offering 50 small group classes every day, so this is by far the biggest offering of live taught online group classes for Taiwanese 台语 / Hokkien.
Very few languages have as many names as 福建话，台语，闽南语 but it is all the same language, though of course with different dialects.
We have a lot of classes but are a small learning community. Please create posts discussing Hokkien culture, life and language study and lets make it fun.
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What alphabet do you use to teach the pronunciation?
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Welcome to the forum @Cuzenu and great question.
It’s a bit messy for writing romanized writing Systems for Taiwanese, so we use the official one from the
中華民國 教育部 版權所有 Ministry of Education
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I didn’t realize if a teacher is assigned to a class their name and picture will appear. In that case, wouldn’t it be easier to show only open classes with teachers? 2 of the classes I booked had no teacher and were cancelled within 1-2hr before the class started. The 3rd attempt the class went live, but there was no teacher available and zoom wouldn’t open since there is no teacher/host. It is misleading to hear classes available 24/7 but really there’s no teachers or actual class, what’s the point of planning for that as student or worse paying for it?
I only realized what a current class should appear like when I browsed other languages at the beginner levels (Japanese/ Simp. Mandarin).
It would be easier to book classes based on the dates/times teachers are willing and able to teach.
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This is a specific issue for a “small” language like Taiwanese we have. We had a full Taiwanese teaching team ready to teach 24/7 when we started. However, then very few people signed up (it takes time for the word to get around). So the teachers that were ready to teach at those times found other things to do, because there is no point to remain on stand by when nobody is studying.
Now we are getting more Taiwanese classes and are rebuilding this system. This would be a very rare occurrence for popular languages like Korean or Japanese, however for Taiwanese at the moment this is harder.
The long term solution is that we need to get more people to study Taiwanese - which of course is the whole point of this project.
We will have an amazing referral program online in a few days too.
For the moment, in general teachers are always most available in Taiwan evening time. A work around is to ask your teacher when she is free next time and then book classes during that time usually.
It is not how Flexi Classes was built, as it is meant to (and can) provide 24/7 online group classes, however for languages with just 2 or 3 students in them we might need to do that until we get a few more. Once we have 15+ students studying regularly it will work fine. We hopefully will be there soon for Taiwanese too.
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I think the referral system would only be beneficial once classes can be booked and attended. It’s hard to refer to something not yet experienced.
For those odd hours, the teachers are not yet assigned so there is no way to confirm who the teacher may be for a specific block of time, and thus no way to confirm which time the teacher is free.
Are any other workarounds/ideas on how to schedule classes?
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Please give it another try by booking another few Taiwanese class. I will make sure they will be taught.
I’m down to my last “free” demo credit, since the first 2 were lost in no teacher classes. I booked the 4/7 13:00 (UTC-5) class, and I noticed that the PDF notes are incorrect. I submitted a feedback slip about that issue.
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@Cuzenu You should send a note about the lost credits to [email protected]. LTL is really good about refunding credits.
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You will receive credits automatically back if there was no teacher. As @Ben-Mandarin-HSK_5 very rightly said we can of course return credits if something went wrong though, so just email [email protected] with an explanation of the issue (screen shots and the URL or the class pages are always useful) and we will get that done straight away