Undergraduate / "underestimating" - Common Application short answer. 150 words or less.... [12]

The short answer needs to talk about an activity. Your essay is trying to provide an excuse for low (well, not really low--low for you) grades, which an essay should not try to do. Think about an extracurricular activity that you like and write about that.

Undergraduate / "Comrade Hu and passion for languages" - College Admissions Essay Introduction [13]

Ah, thanks Gutama--yes, this is just the first paragraph or two of the essay which will go on for a good 500 words more or so. I plan to talk about how I've learned from those mistakes; my Chinese has improved quite a bit now.

Undergraduate / "Comrade Hu and passion for languages" - College Admissions Essay Introduction [13]

Ben, does the following sound more intro-like to you? It is a bit long but it could be shortened.

Mustafa, I wanted to use an introduction that was engaging. Had I started off "I was trying to teach myself Chinese..." it might have seemed boring. Is the following clearer?

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While my athletic friends ran laps, did pushups, and lifted weights, I spent my afternoons performing drills of a different kind.

"Which one is Comrade Hu?" I listened again to the rising and falling tones of the Mandarin Chinese sentence, before spitting out the reply with an automaticity that would make a drill sergeant proud: "That one is Comrade Hu!"

The tapes were a vestige of the 1950s, developed by the Foreign Service Institute to train diplomats in the language before their jobs took them abroad. The course had aged a bit, and it showed: as I listened I wondered how many times I'd be hearing the word comrade on the streets of present-day Beijing.

Nevertheless, it was thorough and the best resource I had at a school that offered only Spanish, French, and Latin. I persisted, committing words like "to come" and "to go" to memory and leaving words like "section chief" for later. Finally, I mustered the courage to try out my Chinese on the native speaker who sat behind me in Freshman Latin. "Wo hui shuo yidianr putonghua!" I said proudly.

He furrowed his eyebrows. "Oh, I speak the other dialect." Bad luck, I guess.
"You speak Cantonese?" I asked, confirming.
"Wait-no. Mandarin. Say that again?"
My tones, he told me, were awful.

Undergraduate / "Comrade Hu and passion for languages" - College Admissions Essay Introduction [13]

Thanks, Mustafa. Could you please tell me which parts confused you? I was trying to teach myself Chinese using an old course developed by the State Department in the fifties to teach diplomats before they assumed their duties. Which parts of the intro confused you?