Her German learning began at home with her father, a second-generation German, and was further refined during a year of study at a Gymnasium in Hamburg. Her areas of specialization include phonetics, teaching of pronunciation, and Chinese morphology. She is the author of Mandarin Compound Verbs (Crane’s, 2006), which received an NTU award for excellent research in 2007, and she is currently working on a book on Taiwan English.