<p>duylam, just drop french. your courseload will still be considered rigorous, no matter what course you choose to replace it with. I'm fluent in 4 languages and so language isn't difficult for me, but I still hate French. bleh.</p>
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The toughest subjects are nevertheless the most fun, and the most motivating. That's the spirit that most AP students take in stride, right?
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<p>no sir. the most "fun" APs were the classes I was interested in. Because of my strong background in those subjects, they came easy to me. And they were most motivating because I loved the material. the toughest ones just played with my GPA and gave me heart attacks. I hated those. bleh.</p>
<p>I would suggest being all hardcore and taking both ... well, if you felt it was within the power of your GPA. </p>
<p>But have you talked it out with your teacher? </p>
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It's getting hard in the sense of all the work my teacher gives me and I also have to relearn the things I've forgotten over the year and I have to learn what the class is going into.
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<p>Are you disoriented/lost? </p>
<p>What is hard about the work? Do you keep on forgetting conjugations? Do you feel overwhelmed that you haven't mastered them from last year? Do you forget vocabulary/idioms? Are you worrying that you shouldn't be looking things up as often as you do? </p>
<p>And OMG, Mandarin. Okay, if you have an excellent Mandarin teacher .... it should go well. If you have a teacher that tries to make you memorise how to read and write characters before you even learn any system of putting the sounds and morphemes together, run far far away! Often Mandarin teachers (especially those who are native speakers) teach as though they are teaching in primary school to native speakers, assuming that learning to write is just a different version of learning to speak. </p>
<p>My suggestions for changing the mindset of language acquisition was intended in fact to get you to think of language acquisition beyond school. It's precisely because mere schoolwork wasn't doing it for me that I searched for other means; I didn't want to reparrot conjugation tables -- I wanted to feel, "get inside" and intuitively grasp my target language.</p>
<p>Dropping a language subject isn't a decision that will just affect your schooling. While you will need to take languages up to the 202 level when you get to UVA, language acquisition impacts you throughout your life.</p>
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