I'm not sure how many people here would like to do language exchange with me, speaking with a slightly different Mandarin, mainly used in Taiwan. As a spoken language, Taiwanese Mandarin is not strictly regarded as a dialect distinct from Chinese Mandarin, though we have hardly same vocabulary for nowaday technology items, though we have hardly same exclamations, or even hardly same frequency using them, to express our emotion or tendency. As a written language, we have much more discrepancy:  Taiwanese Mandarin is written (and read) in traditional characters, while Chinese Mandarin in simplified ones.

As spoken language, for native or excellent Mandarin speakers, they usually notice at the first glance that Taiwanese Mandarin have no er-suffix, which is commonly used to replace the vowels of words, such as "去玩" (pronounced "qü wan," meaning "to play") commonly spoken as "qü wa-er," even in southern Chinese spoken as "qü wa-e," but in Taiwanese Mandarin, we just speak those words as we see them. Whereas, er-suffx wouldn't be the mainly concern effecting how you choose your LE partner, because it doesn't change the meaning of words at all.

What you would mind is the difference between our vocabulary, especially about IC items. In Chinese Mandarin, video, CD, thumb disk, and software are called "錄像" (pronounced as "lu xiang"), "光盤" (guang pan), "U 盤" (U Pan), and "軟件" (ruan jian), but in Taiwanese Mandarin called "影片" (ing pian), "光碟" (guang die), "隨身碟" (sue shen die), and "軟體" (ruan ti). About translated academic terms, there is much difference, but those well-educated prefer to speak them in original language, and it's not main aim of most of you learning Mandarin for discussing academic issues in my opinion.

One more interesting distinctive feature in Taiwanese Mandarin is the high frequency and diversity of exclamation, perhaps stemming from Japan, abutting and even ever colonizing Taiwan. It makes Taiwanese Mandarin nuanced and circumlocutory in expressing our emotion and tendency, but also demure or said less masculine (some Chinese Mandarin speakers even mock Taiwanese ones as "white lotus"). For example, a Taiwanese speaker would say "好哇" (hao wa) instead of "行" (xing) for "OK," "對呀" (due ya) instead of "是" (shi) for "yes," "可是我還沒吃捏" (ke shi wo hai mei chi nei) instead of "沒吃" (mei chi) for "not dined yet." Lack of exclamations makes Chinese Mandarin sound tough and curtail, while spam of them makes Taiwanese Mandarin genial and decorous. It doesn't effect daily conversation, but does inform people that you are not SO native.

As written Language, simplified characters are much easier to learn than traditional ones, especially for foreigners. The rare merits to learn traditional characters are that most of classical compositions of literature and calligraphy (abundant in all tourist destination) are written (and almost esoteric) for traditional character users, and that a traditional character user can facilely figure it out the content written in simplified characters while not vice versa. Whereas, even you are expert in traditional characters, you can't understand the manuscripts before Qin (NOT QING) dynasty (B.C. 221- B.C. 207), because a more ancient and almost dead type of characters, 篆書 (zhuan shu), was used then (but it's still sometimes used in our signature stamps nowadays).