Even if Zuckerberg's main motivation was to learn his wife's language, I believe this will effectively raise the bar for CEOs in the years ahead. I wouldn't be surprised if this seemingly unnecessary skill could signify new business opportunities for large corporations.
It's quite similar to businessmen in the '80s learning Japanese. If you do a lot of business within a country, you are somewhat disadvantaged if you have to rely on a translator.
Jon Huntsman, the politician and businessman, speaks Mandarin. As such, he served as US Ambassador to China. Zuck's not the first – I'm sure there are more examples out there.
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.
This is absolutely correct. Only about 10% of the successful long-term foreign businessmen I know here speak passable Chinese.
Chinese love when you speak the language- but that does not unfortunately translate into the sort of tangible business advantages that many students of Mandarin hope for. It's a wonderful language, and loads of fun to learn- but the ROI is not as high as other areas of study.
>Where's "here"? I lived in Shanghai 3 years I would have put that number pretty close to 0%.
Shenzhen. You're right, 10% is being generous but a lot of long time expats pick up Mandarin not at work but through the "long haired dictionary" method.
I don't know any successful business people that have been here for more than five years that feel it's essential for business. Foreign companies fail here all the time due to not understanding culture, I've never heard of any failing due to the language barrier.
Value comes from scarcity- fully bilingual people simply are not scarce in China.
Why do we go googoogaga over an English speaker learning a foreign language to a competent level, when this is something millions of people do regularly? Mark isn't the first person to learn a language in the middle of a busy job and life schedule.
Doucheness not quite over - it's a big achievement, yeah, but Chinese isn't actually that hard, it's a bit of a myth perpetuated because (a) there's not enough people learning it (b) a lot of teachers are quite shit in my experience (c) hand writing is difficult. in reality spoken Chinese is very simple, grammar is easy, common vocabulary is easily learnt and repeated frequently....
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.
Where is your data on Chinese not being "that" hard? According to US Military studies it's about 10 times as hard to learn as another Germanic language. In my experience, being fluent in two languages and learning Chinese, it's crazy difficult. Everybody has difficulty with different aspects of the language, for me pronunciation and tones are easy, but the ambiguity and "same soundedness" of the words really makes it difficult for me to remember anything. I know that if I put as much effort into learning German as I have Chinese, I would be pretty fluent by now. Instead I'm a still complete newb.
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.
Chinese people are amazed when they find a foreigner speaking their language. In part because they like to see themselves as speaking the world's hardest language. But also because there are not a lot of people who are able to learn and speak this, even though China is going to be the world's largest economy shortly.
It's much harder to learn a language from scratch at that age with that kind of schedule.
Every human language is hard to learn once you go beyond the basics, but what makes a language hard to learn for you is the distance with your mother tongue.
And guess what? Mandarin is one of the most difficult language to learn for a native English speaker.
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.
You won't find a finer example of white privilege.
No one cares if a Chinese CEO (or anyone for that matter) speaks English, no matter the difficulty and effort the learning entails. Contrast this indifference with the flattery of the converse in this thread, and it's quite illuminating of the world we live in.
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.
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.
I wouldn't really agree. Mark makes lots of grammar, vocab, pronunciation and tonal mistakes and the audience seems to understand him with no problems. Spoken Chinese isnt tgat hard and in some ways is much more forgiving than English for non native speakers.
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" :)
I've lived in China 5 years now and our skill levels are comparable so I'm pretty impressed. It's really just basic conversation but the Chinese people will love him for getting this far with it. This along with move to join Tsinghua board will create massive goodwill for FB.
oh man, this doesn't give me much hope. I'm visiting China next fall and was hoping I could have a good handle on the basics by then. I'm learning via Pimsleur and right now I can only say strange phrases like "Would you like to go to the hotel with me?" and "How much money?" I'm joking slightly, I've learned a little bit more than that. But I swear Pimsleur targets their lessons at single men trying to meet foreigners.
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. :)
That is true, but it provides a pretty good foundation. Most other methods don't focus enough on listening and pronunciation.
> "I would like to order two beers." but CANNOT, if you rely solely on Pimsleur, say "I would like to order seven beers."
That doesn't match my experience with Pimsleur. Have you completed a Pimsleur course?
I've done Hebrew and I'm now doing Arabic. Pretty much every new sentence is used as a template and repeated with multiple variations. E.g. in Arabic, numbers are inflected, and they teach you that right in the first unit. So if you know how to say "two beers" then you know how to say "seven beers". It's definitely not an audio version of a phrasebook.
> I get made fun of for sounding like a northerner
Being made fun for sounding like a native is a win on my book!
Hahaha so, not sounding like a native so much as adding r sounds everywhere, which makes you sound a little silly in the south independent of how good you are. Imagine a four year old speaking in a southern drawl here in America, it'd sound pretty odd. See wikipedia's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua
My comment about those two sentences is specifically applicable to people who have done the first dozen or so lessons of Pimsleur's Mandarin Chinese I, which literally contains the sentence "I would like to order two beers" but doesn't cover the numbers until... not sure, I learned the numbers on my own and was liable to have skipped that part if it came later, but I don't remember them in Pimsleur at all.
I remember reading that he was spending an hour a night on this years ago. (I wish I could remember more) but the key being "years" sticks in my mind, yeah.
Highly impressed. I used to brush him off as just another wunderkind who got lucky. In retrospect, his business acumen, especially when acquiring Instagram for a then pricely sum of a billion dollars has made me realize that he truly is special.
If WhatsApp can ultimately generate $1 billion per year in net income, it's worth ~$19 billion.
It's extremely likely they can do that, if they can hold their market position. The business itself is capable of being very profitable over time, and has an extraordinarily low per user cost to operate.
It's not likely WhatsApp will ever be a wildly profitable purchase for Facebook, but it doesn't need to be. Half the point was to eat a rival, the same reason they bought Instagram.
The likely worst case scenario right now, outside of WhatsApp imploding, is that Facebook overpaid by 1x. To grab a billion users, and fend off a huge potential threat, that's easily worth single digit billions of dollars to Facebook.
To summarize Marc Andreesen: When I heard about the Whats App deal, I thought, wow it's worth that much. That must be what it's worth. Should I believe someone on the internet, or Mark Zuckerberg, who had painstakingly researched it, has access to the real financials and bet his own money and the future of his company on it.
I don't know about that; the phone numbers of 600 million users ( and rising ) tied to their identity opens-up the possiblity of correlating geographic graph data.
For example, Joe with a Chicago phone number has six Seattle area-code contacts. That looks like a marketable opportunity, why not advertise him some flights from O'Hare to Sea-Tac?
Chinese is actually much more similar to English (structurally) than a lot of people realize:
It doesn't mark case or gender like English (and it doesn't even really inflect verbs).
The word order is for the most part the same or similar (German has this verb-at-the-end construction that you not only have to learn, but you have to train somewhat to remember enough context to bind the verbs to the clauses they apply to; Japanese is SOV rather than SVO like English/Chinese).
The writing system takes a really long time and a lot of memorization, but if you're learning only to speak and listen, you don't really have to deal with it.
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.
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.
Do you have anything cite for this claim? All the research I'm aware of strongly suggests (1) It's extremely hard for adults to learn new languages - usually requiring many more hours compared to kids learning second language (2) Brain circuitry to hear, distinguish and pronounce new sounds effectively gets shutdown in older age.
I too often read about research that suggests children are better at learning languages than adults, which may or not be true, but I am rarely convinced by these reports. Finding a correlation between the age a person started learning a language and their fluency, the reports then conclude that children are superior learners, without considering other factors like that bi-lingual children are exposed to their languages constantly and must learn them to communicate with others, while adult learners find 2 hours of study onerous and suffer few if any consequences from not learning.
Other studies are more scientifically rigorous, testing the aptitude of various language learning abilities with quizzes and games, but I think we can infer very little about the efficiency of long term studying from these narrow tests.
Just anecdotally, I live in Japan, and most foreigners I know who come as adults and work in a Japanese environment are conversational in a year, fluent in 3 or 4.
I only have this anecdote. My wife, two kids (3 & 5 years old) and I have been taking Mandarin classes for the past six months. My wife & I pick up the concepts, grammar/patterns and vocabulary about three times faster than our kids (we are also forced to work harder at it because we're constantly reinforcing the lessons to them, so that inherently biases this analysis). That said, their pronunciation is muuuuuuuch better than ours.
Kids learn by observing and interacting in the language. Adults usually learn the grammar and vocabulary directly, which is a slower mechanism for the brain.
Unfortunately I can't remember where I heard that recently. Knowing my own habits, it wasn't merely hearsay, and may have been from a podcast or other such non-fiction program, and still may have been a rogue opinion. I wish I could think of it. I'll Google around this evening.
For most people this is probably true, but I started learning Mandarin in college and now have a native-sounding accent, and I know others who have pulled it off too.
I think the key was that in the first few months of studying Mandarin, I listened to recordings of short phrases and repeated them back over and over again until I sounded exactly like the recording. I spent hours in my university's language lab with headphones on, doing this.
But you have to be able to imitate sounds that you hear, and I guess not everyone is naturally good at this. I'd imagine that people who are good at doing impressions, as well as perhaps people with musical talent, have an advantage at learning accents.
What I've gathered is that accents depend on your ability to distinguish phonemes - the classic example is that in western languages there is p vs. b sound - whereas in Tagalog there is also a pb intermediate sound.
If you have an ear for knowing that some languages use that phoneme, you will be more likely to be able to both hear and articulate these sounds (i.e., your aptitude for learning language accents is higher)
I was watching a reality TV show last week (flip this old beach house or somesuch) where a father and his toddler daughter had approximately this dialog.
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.
Hmm dude, everybody here who is not a native English speaker knows at least a second language on top of his mother tongue. I'm French, fluent in English and conversational in Spanish and German and I don't think it's so impressive.
Chinese on the other hand is a bit tougher because the writing is so different.
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.
The guy just seriously raised the bar for qualification as a "scrappy founder"! This will be widely replayed in China, he will be 2x the rock star that he already is. Maybe he can Jack Ma can do English/Chinese practice together online?
I don't think Zuck has been a scrappy anything in years. I'm pretty sure you're disqualified from "scrappy" once you make your first billion. (Possible exception: Notch.)
Wow, well that site was designed by a bunch of dicks. If you scroll down too much to read the article it throws a whopping great big nag screen at you insisting that you register (for free) to continue reading. Then, when you close the wretched thing, using the provided X, it just dumps you on to their home page.
It's like they thought to themselves 'How can we do a paywall but replace all of the users usual disappointment with utter irritation?'
A review of his Mandarin based on a close listen of the first 5 minutes of the video and listening to the rest in the background while I type this (let me know if it changes later):
tl;dr - Definitely ILR 1+, probably an ILR 2. Pronunciation needs a ton of work, but that's not the only aspect that is measured when analyzing speech. The foreign policy article (linked in another comment) is overly critical, imho.
Detailed:
ILR LEVEL
He's definitely at least an ILR 1+. He shows signs of ILR 2 characteristics (and is probably an ILR 2), but it's hard to tell if he can sustain them in a wide range of contexts. While his pronunciation needs A LOT of work, the language itself is comprehensible to a sympathetic native listener. I strongly disagree with the Foreign Policy article that says it was "terrible". I would say that it's actually kind of amazing given that he's the CEO of a huge company. I would roughly say that he is on par with a good / above average 3rd year student at a school with a really good Chinese program. The original article says 2nd year, but this would be a superstar 2nd year student who was either a heritage speaker or had spent a lot of time in China (e.g., as a homestay or study abroad).
DISCOURSE STRUCTURE AND STYLE
He is able to sustain the dialogue for a long time. He is able to circumlocute decently (this really opens up the ability to communicate), but I would really like to see his range of circumlocution. He is able to string together his sentences in moderately cohesive paragraphs. He does not demonstrate the ability to combine paragraphs cohesively at a high level (signs of an ILR 3), but I don't think the tasks really required it.
His style of answering questions was very American -- very direct. I don't think that a Chinese speaker who has lived exclusively in China (i.e., not educated or trained in the "West") would answer the same questions similarly. In this case, I actually think that it's best for him to answer in an American way even if he could answer in a Chinese style, but that's a different and longer discussion.
Early on when he tells the story of his wife and her grandmother, he really comes across as quite charming.
GRAMMAR
He does decently enough. There are errors, but it's not hard to understand what he is saying -- especially for a sympathetic native listener. The sample didn't really demonstrate a wide range of grammar, but the tasks didn't necessarily require a wide range. He is able to say complex sentences (i.e., two independent clauses), and he is able to speak in different timeframes (normally tenses, but Chinese tenses are not like English). This all points to a solid ILR 2, but grammar is definitely not the toughest part of Mandarin.
VOCABULARY
He has a decent vocabulary -- it's solid for the task. I wonder what his vocabulary is like outside of the topics of personal bio information, Facebook, and Facebook business. If he wants to get to ILR 2+ or ILR 3, he will need to work on the accuracy and diversity of his vocabulary.
PRONUNCIATION
This is easily his weakest point. He has a HEAVY American accent. He mispronounces a lot of words. His tones are WAY off. He seems completely unable to say English loan words in Chinese (e.g., Facebook, Google, etc.). It's actually kind of hard to listen to. That being said, I would say that it is all comprehensible to a sympathetic native listener.
SUMMARY
Overall, really good for someone who is not studying full time and has a very involved full time job. I wonder how much of it was practiced or rehearsed -- a lot of the questions are ones that he definitely _should_ practice (e.g., the story about why he started studying Chinese), since they are standard questions that would be asked to him and/or the Facebook CEO. Regardless, speaking in a foreign language to a large group of people is not easy, and he came across really well.
RECOMMENDATIONS
He can work on his pronunciation in several ways:
- Listen more. Even if it's on in the background, it will help. Right now, I don't think he has a good intuitive sense when he is mispronouncing a word.
- When working with a teacher, do lower level language tasks, and act like a native speaker whose voice/accent he likes. Research suggests that this lowers affective filters for pronunciation.
- Work with suprasegmentals with a pronunciation program that visualize what he's saying. It can be enlightening.
- Practice over pronouncing words. If he does what he perceives as a "caricature" of pronouncing the word, he will probably be closer to accurate.
Other than that, listen more, read more, and I think he will become a rock-solid ILR 2 with room for growth if he wants it.
That's my quick-and-dirty. I am very interested in the informed opinions of others.
"His style of answering questions was very American -- very direct."
I'm interested in more expanded thoughts on the above. In what way are non-Americans less "direct" than Americans? Is about politeness/rudeness, or something else? Wouldn't that make miscommunication more probable?
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 agree with your sentiment that it's impressive of him to have learnt Mandarin while running a company like Facebook, at an age well beyond the optimal 'malleable' pre-teen/teen period. It's also brave of him to put himself in a position like this, where he will be judged by millions of people like me.
But, his pronunciation is not good and the flow of his speech is a bit too slow and stuttery in order for this to be interesting to listen to. He's made a lot of headway in the sense that he can piece together sentences that communicate what he wants to say, but I just didn't find it engaging enough to keep on listening. I think he's doing himself a disservice by speaking Mandarin, even though the audience finds it impressive. Educated Chinese usually like practicing their English. Either way -- bravo Mark. You're raising the bar.
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."
That's not sycophantic praise. That's a common refrain that many ABCs would concede whenever hearing any non-Chinese-ethnicity speaking Mandarin (or related language) much better than they would. The fact is that many ABCs (not all) cannot speak anywhere near this level, hence the comments. I say the same when I heard a non-Korean speaking Korean better than me.
"I would say that it is all comprehensible to a sympathetic native listener."
Not really. As a native speaker of mandarin, I have difficulty in catching specific words from time to time, although the rough meaning could be understood.
Guess the self study has gone well. It appears that he struggles at times but never reverts to English. Betting this video will be widely shared in China.
Yes, in China people really tend to appreciate any effort you make at learning their language. You don't have to be fluent to be appreciated for trying. This will go a long way in endearing him to the Chinese people.
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.
That's what I immediately noticed - his grammar and processing speed is pretty slow and steady but his vocabulary is incredible. I mean, he's been studying for what, 2-3 years? I wouldn't be surprised if he was in like the top 1% of people studying Chinese, on top of the fact that he has a small company to run.
I took Chinese in high school and did ok. Didn't use it and have tried to pick it up twice as an adult and have yet to get the tones down in conversation.
Put a book in front of me, I can get it. Let me listen to someone speak it and I am lost.
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.
I find it really hard to watch foreign TV/Movies with subtitles because I lose almost all of the audio, and am pretty much just reading the whole time - path of least resistance to understanding, I guess.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I think he is very sincere in his motivation to learn Chinese and its brave to get up there because to us he sounds pretty foreign. People laughed because it's endearing to listen to, not really funny. To me languages are a lot like programming in that if you can get enough to hack around the problem you are half way there. Honestly its not about the $, because if you speak Chinese it doesn't make you Chinese in a Chinese's eyes, just curious and disciplined.
Just want to add that when I started learning Chinese people made it out like some impossible dream, and when I started to learn to code it was the same (maybe because I have long blonde hair and look like I'm from Florida or something). Truth is its not as hard as you think to become ok, but very hard to master.
So if you are reading this and you ever thought seriously about studying Chinese but "don't have the time"... well, Mark makes time, and if you're reading HN regularly then you are definitely smart enough :)
I was expecting something very impressive when I started the video, annnnnnd... nope. The interviewer speaks to him like he's a little boy (I know, this is the same pace my Chinese teacher was using in my classroom for the first 2-3 months).
And I agree with a lot of comments here: a foreigner speaking fluent English seems normal, yet an American babbling in Chinese seems outstanding...
I know a tiny bit of Mandarin and listened to the first couple of minutes. The first three big laughs seem to be when he looks unsure when asked why he decided to study Chinese, when he says that his wife's grandmother was shocked to hear him speak Chinese, and when he says that Chinese is hard. It's not so much that he tells jokes as that he has an encouraging, sympathizing audience (but what do I know, maybe there are jokes later).
Of course a German professor would say that. (-: I've taken years of both languages in high school and college, and I'd have to disagree with him. An example of the difference in difficulty is that when you learn German coming from an English background there are only four more letters to learn (ä, ö, ü and ß), whereas there are 214 Mandarin radicals to memorize. And these radicals aren't even the entire "alphabet", they're just the basis that all characters expand upon.
Also, Mandarin is a tonal language, along with having vastly different grammar than Germanic languages. While English has plenty of influence from Romance languages, most of it is strictly vocabulary; English, at its core, is a Germanic language. Thus it'd be rather hard to prove that German is more difficult for an English speaker to learn than Chinese. However, I would love to hear his arguments to the contrary, or anybody else's for that matter!
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.
> On the other hand, Mandarin grammar is pretty simple. No conjugations, no genders, just slightly different word order from what you're used to
That's interesting to me as this week I stumbled into Afrikaans, which likewise lacks genders and conjugations and only apepars to have two tenses ( present and perfect ).
Which makes me wonder why other languages have evolved to such levels of complexity, since it seems entirely possible to conduct the affairs of a state without have a distinction between 'I eat' and 'he eats'.
Without knowing how closely related the learner's own language is, it's meaningless. For example, a Dutch speaker would likely find German easier to learn than Chinese. On the other hand, (Mandarin) Chinese is easier for a Cantonese speaker to learn than German.
I don't know why people keep saying that this is very impressive unless he was learning Chinese as he was also running Facebook. His tones and grammar still need a good amount of work. I feel like I am not getting the impact since I go to a university were 15% (very rough estimate) of the student body take four years of Chinese in about 2 years (all languages are compressed to 2 years at Princeton).
edit: After reading more comments, I understand that it is rare, but I can't say it is a much more significant achievement than if he learned another language such as German or Arabic.
What surprises the most that he is able to distinguish sounds that are effectively all same for most non-Chinese people. Research says our ability to distinguish sounds in other languages ceases after first 8 months and that's why it's harder to understand someone talking in foreign language.
Did Zuck had any exposure to Chinese as a kid? Any info on how he learned Chinese? My guess is that he probably decided to talk with wife and relatives only Chinese for a long period of time. According to many this is the best way to learn new language (as opposed to passively watching videos and audio tapes). Another guess is that he may have some really top Chinese teacher giving few hours of tuition per week.
Research says our ability to distinguish sounds in other languages ceases after first 8 months and that's why it's harder to understand someone talking in foreign language.
For me this obstacle went away with sufficient immersion and practice. I started learning Chinese at age 19, the following year I went to China as an exchange student and studied Chinese / Mandarin full time. By the time I came back I was fluent in the language, more fluent than all of the second-generation Chinese-Americans I knew, and with a native-sounding accent, although my vocabulary was still not quite native-speaker level.
I don't know exactly what Zuck is doing to study, but what I did was I went to school in China and spoke almost entirely in Mandarin all day, wrote essays in Chinese, read news articles and novels in Chinese, made Chinese friends, dated Chinese women (and eventually married one).
You really have to live in a foreign language for a period of several years in order to truly learn it.
What surprises the most that he is able to distinguish sounds that are effectively all same for most non-Chinese people.
Learning a new language, especially Mandarin, in adulthood is certainly an accomplishment for anyone, but Zuckerberg is not exactly the first person to do it.
I wish the exoticising of the East would just go away. This mystique associated upon the Chinese language is horribly old-fashioned. It comes up far too often (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7624342)
Of course, we should always encourage ourselves and others to learn foreign languages, even if only to dabble.
Unfortunately, this is just gimmick, and bad gimmick at that. Compare to a completely normalised (and far more impressive!!) display of Chinese-language skill. It's implied that they're mostly housewives: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5na5nHZsww#t=5m30s
The number of Westerners who become conversational in Chinese is astoundingly low compared to vice-versa. It's known to be quite difficult. Being able to publicly answer questions at a Q&A without falling back to English once is a feat that takes years of learning and practice. It is amazing to me that Mark has been able to find the time and dedication for this while simultaneously running one of the most successful tech companies ever.
This isn't on hacker news because the East is exotic or Chinese language is mysterious.
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)
> 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.
Tones, yes. Sounds, not as much. English has a staggering inventory of distinct sounds, including more distinct vowels than most languages and a fairly impressive array of consonants. Furthermore, aside from having many consonant sounds, it has many consonant clusters, both at the start and end of syllables, that are quite difficult for speakers of many languages (including Chinese) to learn.
Not impossible, obviously. But the sound system of English is definitely nontrivial for speakers of Mandarin to master.
Overall, I think English is harder to learn to speak & hear, but Chinese is harder to read & write.
The Chinese students I know who are learning English have to work incredibly hard at it. I don't think it's any easier for them to learn to speak English than for me to learn to speak Chinese. Reading is definitely harder in Chinese.
* The set of sounds in Chinese is actually quite limited both in variety and in word structure. Yes, there are some sounds that don't appear in English and of course tones, but there are more sounds in English that don't appear in Chinese and far more pronunciation patterns. Words that don't end in vowels or n/ng, for example. Chinese doesn't have them.
* English grammar is far more complex than Chinese. Articles and verb tense stand out to me, but a proper English teacher would be better able to list the challenges.
On the other hand, both languages have mitigating factors that make it easier:
* International English / Business English is a pretty well-established subset of the language.
* Chinese has a common subset of about 1000-2000 characters that you can use to read newspapers and signs.
* Both languages are lingua francas, so in everyday use people are relatively forgiving of second language learners. (Mandarin Chinese is the lingua franca of the Chinese empire, which includes tens of minority languages.)
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.
I think you underestimate how much time and effort it takes to run a large company. No matter who you are, learning a language takes years of effort and dedication. I probably have 100 times as much free time as he does and would love to learn to speak Chinese, yet I haven't pushed myself to fulfill this achievement. The fact that he has such little free time but still chooses to use it productively is inspiring to me.
I largely agree that the mystique has to go, and that conversational Chinese is not nearly as hard to learn as believed, but I disagree that Mandarin is easy as a whole.
Characters are hard. There are thousands of them, with only loose auditory or semantic meaning. Learning to write and read Chinese is almost always going to involve rote memorization, hopefully using spaced repetition.
I've been studying Mandarin in a non-intensive but formal class for 6 years, speak a bit better than mark to Mark here and almost definitely with a larger vocabulary (though this could be 100% biased by the intimidation of a large fluent crowd in his case), and cannot even hope to read a simple Chinese novel or newspaper. I've heard anecdotally that doing so requires working knowledge of about 10,000 characters.
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.
Zuckerberg's Chinese does sound pretty awful right now (although his listening comprehension looked much better), but it doesn't seem right to compare him to individuals that are fully immersed in a Chinese-speaking environment (probably for a many years). Also learning Chinese to speak to your wife's family isn't a gimmick.
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?
