Language Teaching For Backpackers in Asia

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Teaching languages as a foreigner in Asia is really popular these days. Many backpackers from Europe really fall in love with Asia and ends up spending many years there, often doing jobs like language teaching. There is something special with Asia that makes you really not want to go back to work in boring Europe or the US again.

Anyways, most of these young backpackers end up becoming English teachers. There are several countries in Asia that you can teach English in, Thailand, Korea and Japan being the most common. I have also met people teaching English in Cambodia, Laos and Singapore on my travels in Asia however, and almost all of them seem to enjoy their job. There is a high demand for English teachers in Asia as it is often very hard to find local people that speak English well enough to be able to teach it.

The only bad thing with being an English teacher in most Asian countries is the salary. Countries like Thailand, Cambodia and Laos are really cheap to live in, but that is of course also reflected in the salaries. Like I said, being an English teacher is quite popular these days, so the language schools don not have to give high salaries to attract people to work for them. The salary is still quite good in Korea and Japan though, but again these countries are more expensive to live in.

Something that I would suggest is to look into teaching other languages than English. Often the salary will be quite a bit higher if you're teaching another language, as it is quite hard for language schools to find teachers qualified to teach other languages. There is a big market for the large languages like Spanish, German and French, and even speaking these languages as your second language chances are you can get a job.

Also when it comes to smaller languages there might be a market for teaching it somewhere in Asia. Take a country like Philippines, they speak good English there so there is not much of a market for that, but when it comes to other languages, even small ones like Norwegian and Swedish, there is a market. The reason is that it is very common for Filipinos to work abroad, both on ships and in different countries all over the world, and foreign companies prefer that they speak some of the local language then.

I have myself had the experience to teach languages in Manila, which was a very rewarding and interesting experience. There was a wide range of different students, my youngest 16 and my oldest close to 40 years old. Most of my students were planning to go abroad to work in the near future, and some just wanted to learn the language as they had relatives from my country.