Mandarin Chinese

I am from Taiwan. My native language is Hokkien, a Chinese dialect spoken in the Hokkien province in Southeast China. I grew up in a Hakka town where the Hakka dialect, spoken natively by the Hakka people throughout Southern China and Taiwan, was used as a common language in daily life. I picked up the Hakka dialect through playing with kids in the neighborhood. My acquisition of Mandarin Chinese began after I started school as it was the official school education language. As Chinese dialects share the same characters, they are not identified as a second language to me. English is considered my second language that I started learning from middle school and not being fluent until I came to the US as a graduate student.