<p>4everdancer18, My parents put me in a Chinese school when I was four, but I didn’t really study the language and just wanted to socialize with the other kids. I really regret not wanting to study it when I was younger. So, I attended CHinese school for a year before they found out I was only concerned about hanging out with kids at recess.</p>
<p>My parents are pretty busy with their jobs and really don’t want to be the ones teaching me; they speak better English than Chinese since they spent a lot of their childhood in the U.S. Chinese was only spoken to me when I was little 'cause I was in China at the time.</p>
<p>So far, I have only watched a couple Taiwanese dramas. I have heard that there are slight grammatical differences between the Taiwanese dialect of Mandarin Chinese and that of the mainland. Have you noticed any grammatical differences? What kind of Chinese/Mandarin dramas would you recommend?</p>
<p>Thanks for your post. What you told me really helps. Good luck with your academic studies as well, fellow Chinese :-)</p>
<p>In that case I would look into programs at your college other than the foreign language courses. of course, theres the ever so popular study abroad. Also I know my college has language house, which is a living learning program in which you have to sign a contract saying that you’ll speak in the target language (or at least attempt to) 80% of the time.</p>
<p>There are many many good shows/movies out there. Some off the top of my head are “On Call 36 小時” (t/n 小時 = hours). It’s a cantonese drama with a medical setting (something you may be interested in since you’re going into bioe). Another one is “Love in Disguise” (Chinese 戀愛通告), which is a taiwanese movie. You’ll love this if you like Wang Leehom. Also two other movies that I haven’t seen but I heard were really good are “Shanghai Calling” and “Touch of Light”</p>
<p>Hopes this helps! If you get a chance to check out and of the movies/shows, let me know if you like them ^_^</p>
<p>Tom nailed it above. DD1 took a Calc class in a local CC during summer and pretty much everything Tom wrote was the case. The flagship U she attends will not transfer anything higher than Calc 2 from a CC. In her case she compared the syllabus between the two and found the CC actually taught more material…</p>
<p>The most interesting difference is that in college, the Calc class had 10% of the grade as homework while in CC it was 4 times that, 40%. But when we say homework we mean Kumon style online, a humongous number of problems per day on the web site. </p>
<p>Since I’m Elbonian and my wife is Asian and neither language is very useful in the real world (she’s from one of those expansion countries :)) our girls are doing more useful languages; one is nearly bilingual (French & English - heavy duty individual tutoring for years + school) and the other has also done French and will be continuing it in college. Due to their Eurasian looks they’re rarely identified correctly (can’t even get the continent right in most cases :))</p>