I'm (ethnically) Chinese too, though I was born in Australia, and my parents lived in Vietnam when they were kids, only their parents came from China, so I don't know much. I can understand Teochew quite well though (or at least the teochew my family speaks... my mum says it's quite different from the teochew spoken in Shantou), but sometimes have trouble speaking it, and I'm learning mandarin at school, though I don't think I will learn enough to be fluent, or even conversational
. I went to chinese school for about 2 years, and I think all the teachers were taiwanese, because we learned traditional, though we're currently learning simplified characters at school. Oh well, one day I shall learn
I watch few TW dramas though, and I try to pick up some words and phrases every now and then, which seems to help. Also, I was wondering why Taiwanese (or Hokkien? I'm not sure which...) has some aspects which are quite similar to Teochew, even though they are from different regions (or are they originally all from one place?...).