Today's interesting article about Mark Zuckerberg's recent attempt at Mandarin. What do you guys think of it then? Could you do better?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mark-zuckerberg/11182575/How-good-really-is-Mark-Zuckerbergs-Mandarin.html

And I imagine this strikes a chord with many... but we will persevere! :) "Learning Chinese is hard. In short, the ratio of effort to reward is so dismal that all but the most mindlessly dogged foreigners give up."

It's rather stilted, but I'm pretty impressed considering how busy the guy is. I can't imagine he has a lot of time to study and practice.

One thing about the article I found misleading is that it claims that there is no alphabet so one must learn through rote memorization. With the use of pinyin, I don't think this is exactly true.

Imagine the Western pubic going mental over a Chinese dude speaking broken English.

I also found this article misleading in many ways. Another paragraph that I frankly believe to be completely untrue is this:

"Even professors of Chinese find it daunting to be handed a book and asked to read a passage. When my Chinese colleague looks at a text message on his phone, it takes him a good minute to decipher its meaning."

The only way this would ever be true is if the subject of the text message is a scholarly subject, like classical Chinese or something.

The other statistic that I am not sure I believe is that it says 1/3 of Chinese people can't speak Mandarin.

As far as Zuckerberg's Chinese, yeah his pronunciation is poor and he's not very fluent, but he's a busy guy, and it's probably not high on his priority list if he first started studying it in 2010.

The other statistic that I am not sure I believe is that it says 1/3 of Chinese people can't speak Mandarin.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-23975037

Facebook banned 2009, publicly declared learning chinese 2010, hour a day with tutor in morning, this is business for him - assume is busy and missed some days, so he probably has 500-1000 hours in. He's doing pretty well I think. Maybe he's a skritter user.

Telegraph is not doing ok. Why isn't their Beijing correspondent competent in chinese? I bet you have to speak French to work as Paris correspondent, German to work as German correspondent etc.

I'm pretty sure no one in Wuhan can speak PuTongHua

I think it's important for us to remember that, as language learners, we are all severely critical of the language ability of other second language learners because we are so quick to severely criticize ourselves.

There's a certain feeling of satisfaction that comes with feeling as if our own language learning progress is faster or more fully-formed than our peers. But this satisfaction is extremely temporary and produces a much more negative effect on others that outweighs the positive effect it has on ourselves.

The fact is that this guy's learning a new language and it doesn't matter what language it is or how well he can speak, read, write, and understand it - he's one of us, and we should have his back.

@fullarmorhigh right on. I run into a lot of insecure people that like nothing more than to tear someone else down when they try to speak another language, or dismiss someone's accomplishments. Haters gonna hate...

http://www.quickmeme.com/img/06/06164e5499445c9d3614c6608ac489da17b3696357ce076685142db1b26f4f5a.jpg

He does better to keep up the pace of the conversation than most of the foreigners I've met in China. Haven't said so he really needs to work on the tones and sentence structure, he uses a lot of english patterns into chinese.

So we should just dole out praise on anyone? I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with critiquing another person. No one is being nasty, besides, I doubt Mark is going to read this thread. I take more issue with the article's inaccuracies. Or am I being a "hater" for that, too?

+1 rmzhao82 Positive critique is the basis to get better.

胡马林, I think it can be useful. When you mentioned how he uses English patterns in Chinese, for example, that made me think about how I sometimes make this mistake and it's something I could pay more attention to.

@rmzhao82 False dichotomy, dude. Positive critiques, absolutely. Likening it to broken English, as 本杰明 did, is just trolling.

Ben's comment doesn't count as trolling - he made a valuable social observation, albeit with dry humor. He's surely right that a US audience wouldn't behave like that? Can you imagine Jack Ma of Alibaba getting the same response at a US university.

His Chinese is "broken", is it not? Besides, there's a difference between criticising a fellow language learner and a millionaire businessman that doesn't care what I think.

I agree with @jww1066 we should be nice and not give in to envy at this @#$! Zuckerberg guy not only being a billion times richer than me but speaking better Chinese while learning in his spare time.

Still I thought Benjamin's reverse perspective comment "Imagine the Western public going mental over a Chinese dude speaking broken English" was funny and a good point.

We've all gotten effusive compliments for saying something as dumb as "ni hao". I could imagine a good SNL skit or Onion page about Americans going wild because a Chinese guy just said "hello" :)

I personally thought Zuckerberg's performance was (I hate to say it) pretty impressive, but I couldn't stand to watch the whole thing because of some combination of envy and embarrassment and boredom. All kudos to him though.

Just compare with Jack Ma's performance in Stanford U.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRp4jiJed3c

I think the distance between English and Chinese is the same measured in either direction.

But still Zuckerberg's spoken Mandarin is already better than those of the 30% of native Chinese people who can't speak it.

Jack Ma's a good speaker. But unlike Zuck, he focused on learning English early on, and was immersed in the language for his work:

"At an early age, Ma developed a desire to learn English so he rode his bike for 45 minutes each morning in order to go to a nearby hotel and converse with foreigners. He would guide them around the city for free in order to practice and improve his English. Later in his youth, although he failed the entrance exam twice, he attended Hangzhou Teacher's Institute and graduated in 1988 with a bachelor's degree in English. He later became a lecturer in English and International Trade at the Hangzhou Dianzi University."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma

The president of Lenovo, Yuanqing Yang, learned English much later, and it shows:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIKaushS72k
(the inserted "a" is a strange tic)

He still likely put a lot more effort and time into learning English than Zuck did on Chinese.

"While Lenovo's official language is English, Yang initially did not understand the language well; he relocated his family to Morrisville in order to improve his language skills and soak up American culture. Yang also hired a private tutor and watched cable news in order to practice."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Yuanqing

More recent Yang -- his English has actually gotten pretty good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kylKlvNs4i0