Mark Zuckerberg Answers Q&A in Mandarin at Chinese University (opens in new tab)

I guess my point is that I don't think that's particularly relevant. The story is "man does something incredibly difficult whilst dealing with big work pressures". I doubt that Marks life pressures are greater than lots of "normal" people who learn languages everyday, and learning spoken Chinese to his level isn't actually that hard. he also has the benefits of practically unlimited resources to spend on learning.

...which is probably very telling about the general open mindness of American CEOs of $200bn companies ;)

It's my personal experience. I don't really know how you quantify a language as being 10x as hard? Do you need to be 10x more clever or work 10x more? The American foreign diplomat service routinely trains its staff to relative fluency in a couple of years.

As with my other comments, taking Chinese as a whole it is difficult, but breaking it down into components, some parts are crazy hard and parts are quite easy. I think once you get past the hump of becoming used to tones and some of the initial grammar weirdness (for English speakers) then there aren't many grammar complexities, vocabulary is very repetitive and even poor pronunciation isn't as big a deal as you think - witness Mark making lots of tone errors but being understood quite well.

Yes and no - achieving real fluency after a certain age is very very hard, near impossible. Writing chinese by hand is exceptionally difficult too. Typing characters using pinyin inputs is significantly easier. Speaking in simple conversations like Mark has is really not that hard - again, not to undermine him specifically, but rather to dispel the idea that this is some superhuman achievement. he's at at moderate level in spoken Chinese, I would expect any learner who has the same teachers and a Chinese wife and family to achieve a similar level in that amount of time.

This has nothing to do with white privilege. I am a rather white English-speaking Frenchman, I've lived for 4 years in Vancouver and people never complimented for being fluent or bilingual. This is just either people fawning in front of powerful people or most likely some form of anglo-centrism where speaking a foreign language is something exceptional (which it's not).

That being said, good on him for making the effort.

> You won't find a finer example of white privilege.

I don't buy it. The story is prominent person does something you don't expect, not prominent white person does something you don't expect.

It's not hard to understand someone speaking poor English, and we're used to encountering ESL speakers. On the other hand, if I make a mistake in Japanese, especially when writing, nobody can understand me. It takes a lot of practice to get from being able to use a convenience store to having any kind of conversation.

Some of that is because they're not used to non-native speakers, but much of it is just the structure of the language and room for error-correction. I'd assume it's the same for Mandarin with so many short words and tones.

Totally - I know plenty of Chinese people with equally busy lives who learn exceptional English because they have no choice. they often experience awful teachers, poor learning methods, and still manage it. I don't want to spit on Marks achievement, but I'd love a bit of realism - we should expect this standard, not wet our pants because one ridiculously rich guy can say "I like big fast trains" :)

white privilege? don't you mean anglocentricism? the bias would be equally present if Mark was African-American or Asian-American.

Exactly. If learning Chinese is so difficult for an English speaker, why wouldn't the opposite be true?

Chinese is basically English grammar with different words...Japanese on the other hand is much more weird. Getting tones right is key, but they are easy to practice.

Writing is quite hard; I'm conversational but basically illiterate.

But if you only speak and listen, you still have to deal with tones :)

Per hour, adults are more efficient at learning languages. But kids forced into another language typically get more hours of exposure than adults attempting to force themselves to learn a language.

I'm unconvinced that a school-setting can teach children languages vastly more effectively than an adult (or an adult can self-teach). Maybe for very young children, but even that I'm sceptical of.

You're speaking four related western European languages.

For example, when you learned English, notwithstanding the fact that you are surrounded by English since you're a child, you had from day one several thousands words of vocabulary and knew a superset of the English grammar (FYI, 45% of English words are of French origin).

I'm fluent in three European languages as well. I can feel that I could pick up Italian or Dutch very easily (I'm > 35 y.o.). When trying Russian with my gf, I don't have the same feeling.

It's impressive in America, where it's not needed, and moreso because Chinese is "exotic" and superficially less "practical" than learning Spanish, which is a useful thing to know south of New York.

3 languages for a french person? I'd say that's unbelievable.

Oh ok.

Here's how I did it:

Listen a lot, as often as possible. Watch TV and movies - there are many on Youtube and Youku. I like to convert interviews from Youtube into mp3s and listen to them during the day during down time. Pick a character in these shows and try to imitate their accent (stick to someone your own gender). Try not to read the subtitles (even the Chinese subtitles).

If you want to go further, strip out voice clips from these TV and movies and put them into an SRS system (Anki, Mnemosyne, etc...).

Watch reality Chinese television with subtitles. You get both the visual confirmation alongside the sound. They can be kind of a drag to get through (esp if you're used to HBO-level stuff), but the benefit of reality TV is that you can miss parts of a conversation and not be completely confused as to what's going on as there is no real plot.

Record yourself speaking and listen for mistakes. Hands down this is one of the best ways to improve your spoken ability in a language (even your native language if you want to avoid umms, and ahhs and so on).

Use a tool like Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Find a recording of a native speaker that has a transcript.

Listen to a section of the recording.

Record yourself saying the same thing.

Listen back to your recording for mistakes and problems.

Repeat the record/listen cycle until you are happy.

Move on to the next segment.

Finally the most important part and key to the whole thing: do it every day. If you do 30 mins of this a day then you'll notice minor improvements after about a month and significant improvements after about three months.

Also, a shameless plug, check out http://www.chinese-forums.com/ which has a load of advice for learners of Chinese.

And my own tools for learning Chinese:

http://www.imralsoftware.com/

What the others are saying. The thing is, your brain is very plastic and will eventually grow new connections to process the novel sonic inputs -- but there will be some time delay involved. Not a lot will happen for a while. But then... a lot will happen. It will all start gelling, and making sense.

The key is to (1) watch/read/listen to stuff you truly love, and (2) make a sustained practice of it.

Beyond what's already been suggested: Work through the DLI tapes ("tapes"). They're good at throwing varied phrasing at you. For pronunciation in general, find an instructor who's good at teaching Americans how to make the sounds right. There are some mouth positioning tricks that are helpful. http://fsi-dli.yojik.eu/DLI/Chinese%20Mandarin/ for the DLI stuff.

Make some Chinese friends and speak only Chinese with them. Really listen to them and try to say the words and phrases the way they say them.

You have to socialize in the language, that's really the only way to learn it.

Setting Siri to Mandarin is great practice.

I think that the number of Westerners who achieve conversational fluency in Chinese is limited only by motivation and access to resources. It's more difficult for an American than learning Spanish, sure, but wholly within the grasp of anyone willing to put in the effort.

The skill-level displayed in the Facebook video is about what you'd expect from a student having completed about four semesters of Chinese education from a mid-tier state school.

The other video is much more impressive as a display of language skill. There's a natural fluency on display, and it comes from a bunch of regular folks who have the benefit of an immersive learning environment and probably not that much more.

It's interesting sometimes it's harder to go from language A -> B than B -> A.

If you're born Japanese then you lost the language lottery. Japanese has a limited set of sounds and there are very few close languages grammatically; Korean being the major one. So even the global language, English, is a massive challenge. It's easier for a Chinese person to learn Japanese than the other way round. (Japanese speakers at least have a big leg up on reading Chinese)

I wonder if it's easier to go from Chinese to English, they certainly have more sounds/tones an English speaker will have never spoken. In reality, major different is probably a power difference, it's a lot more useful to know English than it is to know Mandarin in the general case. (If a Chinese student goes to France they'll be using English)

Uhm. Hate me for being the downer, but.. isn't he most likely heavily invested due to his wife? And do you think it is harder to learn a foreign language as Joe Random Guy or might it be easier if you try to learn the language of your significant other?

Is it harder to learn a foreign language if you manage a huge business and are insanely rich or is it harder if you work to make do, have kids and not a lot of free time?

Is it a business strategy, a gimmick that the company paid for? A real personal investment?

Everyone learning a completely foreign language impresses me. Zuckerberg just scores really, really low on my utterly personal "Am I impressed" scale.

The OP linked to a dismissal of this article...

According to my newspaper reading professor, only college professors who study characters know up to 10,000 characters--and they are badasses. I think 3-4,000 is enough for normal human beings. Anything above that is just downright nerdy.

I can write around 4000 characters / 7000 words according to Skritter and am pretty OK reading a newspaper. 10,000 characters is much more than you need.

The gimmick is not in his motivation for learning. It's in how this is presented and contextualised.

For further comparison, Kevin Rudd's Chinese-language interview for Mandarin News Australia (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bro4mkb_VKc) and then-Taipei-mayor Ma Ying-jeou's English-language interview for Council on Foreign Relations (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80GysZ3sldM#t=10m). Both Kevin Rudd and Ma Ying-jeou display fluency and mastery of foreign language.

Even Kevin Rudd has to engage in the same ritual formalities: the denial that his 普通話得實在是太好的. (馬英九 is never subject to this.)

Thankfully, Rudd's interview moves past this, and we never have to hear him answer 你喜歡什麼中國菜? or 在工作之外你會有什麼活動?

Great question, and it's a tough one to answer.

First, this is not an issue that's purely "American vs non-American". It's a US compared to Chinese. As a contrast, Russians tend to be very direct even though they are very much non-American.

In this specific case, it has to do with his speech acts and his audience. This is a _huge_ topic, so I will only scratch the surface.

A simple and clear example would be how he answered the "Why are you studying Chinese?" question.

Mark answers with a touching story about his wife and his wife's grandmother. To an American audience, this is very personable, and it is very plausible.

My brief take on a "Chinese-style CEO" answer would be something like this: "Well, Chinese is important for everyone to know. It has a long and storied history, and it is undoubtedly the most important language for people to know today and moving ahead into the future. As the CEO of a large American company, I think that it is only prudent that I learn the language of one of our most important audiences." I don't think a Chinese-style answer would even bring Priscilla's heritage into the response for a number of reasons (e.g., they already know, it's personal not business, etc.).

For reference, my hypothetical response is a kind of DST (search for "DST LOL") that is common in some cultures, even if it is blatant DST.

Note that speech acts are important in all cultures, and that my Chinese example could easily be used in an American context. The important thing to ask is "What am I trying to say in the big picture?". Engineers tend to go for the direct answer, but it's not always the most appealing for a given context.

I tend to agree with this assessment of his Mandarin more than the gp's. As a native speaker, I must disagree when gp says: "He does decently enough. There are errors, but it's not hard to understand what he is saying -- especially for a sympathetic native listener." Large parts were incomprehensible to me (in part due to the audio quality), and the host's repetition of what Zuckerberg said--he does this many times--were a breath of fresh air. Maybe the experience between gp and myself was like the one mentioned in the Foreign Policy article [1]. The author mentions that he was an adult learner of Chinese and was able to understand Zuckerberg's Mandarin better than a native Mandarin speaker who watched the video with him.

I do admire the energy Zuckerberg is putting into learning Chinese. It's not an easy language to learn. What I found interesting was the sycophantic praise from ABCs in the comments section with gems like: "As much as we are impressed with your Chinese, you made a lot of the ABCs here feel ashamed."

[1] http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/10/22/mark_zuckerbe...

That is what "comprehensible" means. That the intent of the communication can be understood.

J. Paul Getty learned arabic to help his oil deals...

I've been told by Americans doing business in China that, even if you have pretty good Chinese, you don't have good business Chinese unless you specifically know that you do. So you'll get a translator anyway.

Understanding the culture is important to understanding the product you provide, if it's at all different, so that can be pretty important.

It's the official position of the Chinese Government that Facebook is not allowed in mainland China. That is plainly the case, and has been for many years.

Facebook is pretty uniformly blocked in China. I've never encountered a network where I could access it outside of using a VPN.

So, my thing about Pimsleur is that I assume they intend for you to supplement it. For instance, given what you've learned already, you can probably say, "I would like to order two beers." but CANNOT, if you rely solely on Pimsleur, say "I would like to order seven beers." Because they teach you some sentences and what they mean but don't teach you basics.

Languages are vast oceans of meaning and composition -- 90 hours simply is not enough for Chinese (or any language, really, reality itself is too complex to describe with a system that simple).

I'd recommend learning the characters using Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi (this should take about 100-200 hours), and then shifting to HSK (which should be pretty easy post-character learning) + full sentences.

If you like Pimsleur, keep with it, although I get made fun of for sounding like a northerner a bit from using it for pronunciation help when I was beginning. :)

Whats App was a huge mistake though. That data is not worth Billions.

Blocking "foreignpolicy.com###TB_iframeContent" in ABP seems to take care of it.

NoScript is your friend, I saw no such nag screen.

Is there a translation?

I know almost no German, but I learned French to fluency and know spoken Mandarin somewhat well.

I think that talking about the relative difficulty of a language as a whole is not really workable. There are different aspects which order differently.

For example, if you already speak English then you'll find German vocabulary far easier to learn. There will be a lot of shared or similar words that you can build on. In Mandarin, there are almost no common words, so you basically have to start from scratch.

On the other hand, Mandarin grammar is pretty simple. No conjugations, no genders, just slightly different word order from what you're used to. If you know how to say "I eat noodles" and you know how to say "yesterday" then you know how to say "I ate noodles yesterday". We spent a long time learning how to conjugate the various past tenses in French class, and I believe German is similar.

I think there's no contest when it comes to reading and writing. Learning to read and write Mandarin is almost like learning a whole separate language from the spoken version.

I think the easy grammar helps give Mandarin a big advantage, especially if you're learning it for casual conversations. But that advantage is greatly reversed in other areas. Much will depend on what the individual language learner finds easy and hard to learn.