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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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.
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.
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."