UCLA students are required to take a year of a foreign language in order to graduate. Luckily, students are given many options to choose from, ranging from commonly taught foreign languages such as Spanish to other languages such as Swahili. I chose to take Chinese to fulfill my…

English is not my first language. It’s also not my second language. I grew up listening to and speaking an amalgamation of three different Chinese dialects: Mandarin, Cantonese, and Fujianese. Most children play with dolls and teddy bears – I spent the first four-and-a-half years of my life…

What is up with UCLA’s Chinese placement test?  Currently students may only take the placement test in the Mandarin dialect, the standard language of mainland China and Taiwan. Of course, Mandarin is a very useful dialect to know, since it is the most widely spoken language in the…