Gao juggles skating, Harvard studies | Golden Skate

Gao juggles skating, Harvard studies

gsk8

Record Breaker
Joined
Jun 21, 2003
Country
United-States
USA Today - After finishing fifth at US Nats the past three seasons and just about quitting the sport last year, Gao is having the best season of her career — while going to Harvard full time.

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Joined
Aug 16, 2009
This just knocks me out. The girl must be made of iron. Even the Hughes girls, Yale and Harvard respectively, waited until after they skated at the Olympics to go to college.
 

jenaj

Record Breaker
Joined
Aug 17, 2003
Country
United-States
USA Today - After finishing fifth at US Nats the past three seasons and just about quitting the sport last year, Gao is having the best season of her career — while going to Harvard full time.

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She takes the bus every morning to the rink???! I am in awe of her dedication.
 
Joined
Jun 21, 2003
How interesting that Harvard offers a course in "Chinese for Heritage Students." I wonder if her family spoke Chinese at home or if they deliberately wanted their children to become Americanized as quickly as possible.
 

burntBREAD

Medalist
Joined
Mar 27, 2010
How interesting that Harvard offers a course in "Chinese for Heritage Students." I wonder if her family spoke Chinese at home or if they deliberately wanted their children to become Americanized as quickly as possible.

We have that here at University of Michigan as well -- it's a bit unfair to put both "native speakers" and people just learning in the same class, so they split them up. From my experience (with my parents as well as others in my area), Chinese parents actually begin to regret not immersing their children in Chinese more, as when we start to grow we speak English at school and elsewhere outside, so Chinese is basically only spoken in the home, with family friends, or at Chinese school, in my case ;) .
 

aftertherain

Record Breaker
Joined
Jan 15, 2010
We have that here at University of Michigan as well -- it's a bit unfair to put both "native speakers" and people just learning in the same class, so they split them up.

I agree with burntBREAD. Different spanish courses are offered for non-native speakers and one for native speakers in one of the high schools where I live. They've designed differently to meet the needs of different students-- I think students in the native-speakers course were already reading Spanish literature in the first or second year while those in non-native courses were still learning how to conjugate verbs.

(Also, Christina must be some kind of superhuman to go to Harvard full-time AND skate full-time. Either that, or she's immensely disciplined. I don't hope that she does this in the upcoming Olympic season though, but it's up to her to decide!)
 

ice coverage

avatar credit: @miyan5605
Record Breaker
Joined
Feb 27, 2012
For their "Harvard Chinese Bx Final Project," Gao and some classmates produced (and starred in) a fun video (7:44 in length; posted Dec 11, 2012):
They speak and sing in Chinese, of course, but the video includes English subtitles.
Woven into the storyline are a brief reference to Gao's skating and a few seconds of footage of her performing at Skate America.

Harvard's Chinese Bx course ("Elementary Chinese for Advanced Beginners") is "for students with significant listening and speaking background."
My understanding is that Bx students cover in one semester what other students learn in two semesters of second-year Chinese.
 
Joined
Jun 21, 2003
For their "Harvard Chinese Bx Final Project," Gao and some classmates produced (and starred in) a fun video (7:44 in length; posted Dec 11, 2012):


They speak and sing in Chinese, of course, but the video includes English subtitles. Woven into the storyline are a brief reference to Gao's skating and a few seconds of footage of her performing at Skate America.

Harvard's Chinese Bx course ("Elementary Chinese for Advanced Beginners") is "for students with significant listening and speaking background." My understanding is that Bx students cover in one semester what other students learn in two semesters of second-year Chinese.

:clap: :clap: :clap: A+.

Having been (long ago) an "other student taking two semesters of second year Chinese," I can pretty much guarantee that none of us could converse as well as these students.

What is the Chinese for "yeah, yeah" as featured in the first song? ;)

Did they write the second song themselves? Music. too?

When I studied Chinese in college in the 1960s, that was at the height of the cold war. "Communist China" (bad) and "Nationalist China" (good) were hot news items. In fact, my instructor was an American scholar who had been caught up in the revolution in 1948 and placed under house arrest for a number of years. When he was finally allowed the leave the country, he got in trouble with the U.S. government because he refused to say that his Communist captors had tortured him. (In fact, he was well treated and said that frankly the Chinese authorities were glad to be rid of the responsibility of keeping him there.)

Anyway, our text books were written in Taiwan. The first sentence we had to translate was, "When we return to the mainland, everything will be in harmony."
 

momskate

Rinkside
Joined
May 4, 2012
Good for her, but thats exactly why she wouldn't be able to become a champion. You can't do both.
 
Joined
Aug 16, 2009
:clap: :clap: :clap: A+.

Having been (long ago) an "other student taking two semesters of second year Chinese," I can pretty much guarantee that none of us could converse as well as these students.

What is the Chinese for "yeah, yeah" as featured in the first song? ;)

Did they write the second song themselves? Music. too?

When I studied Chinese in college in the 1960s, that was at the height of the cold war. "Communist China" (bad) and "Nationalist China" (good) were hot news items. In fact, my instructor was an American scholar who had been caught up in the revolution in 1948 and placed under house arrest for a number of years. When he was finally allowed the leave the country, he got in trouble with the U.S. government because he refused to say that his Communist captors had tortured him. (In fact, he was well treated and said that frankly the Chinese authorities were glad to be rid of the responsibility of keeping him there.)

Anyway, our text books were written in Taiwan. The first sentence we had to translate was, "When we return to the mainland, everything will be in harmony."

Wow, Math. I too remember when we all thought of "China" as Taiwan. Was Mandarin what was taught at that point?

Totally off topic, but I'm no good at resisting history-geek temptation: I remember when things started to open up between China and the West, and an Italian company, I think RAI, did a TV series on Marco Polo. For the first time in years, it was possible to have mainland Chinese actors take part. Kublai Khan was played by Ying Ruo-cheng, a marvelous actor who had learned English as a young man before Mao came into power. He appeared on some American talk shows to promote the TV series, and he was so charming. He was later very influential in international films and theatrical productions, in English and Chinese. He was China's first Willy Loman when Arthur Miller was invited over to mount a production of Death of a Salesman.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2004/jan/12/guardianobituaries.china
 
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