Zuckerberg Speaks Mandarin, Blows Everyone’s Mind

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-mandarin-blows-everyones-mind/

by hjc89 • 12 years ago

67 55 12 years ago

wired.com

tmikaeld• 12 years ago

That actually IS impressive, Mandarin is very hard to learn and he should have credit for it.

Though I'm sure he had a really good teacher.

Argorak5• 12 years ago

It didn't blow my mind. He learned a language, quite some people do that, even if the language is hard and remote.

Headline disproven.

Edit: it is impressive, as any language skill remote from you mother tongue. But I am not a fan of superlatives, especially if they indicate that I should take part in the appreciation.

FWIW: German headline on the topic: "Facebook CEO [...] impresses students".

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/facbeook-chef-mark-zucker...

rmc• 12 years ago

Quite a lot of people don't.

xiaq• 12 years ago

Not to say that quite a lot of CEOs don't...

zhaphod• 12 years ago

Actually context matters here.

If some one from USA/UK/France, for example, learns a new language it definitely is a surprise. May be blows the mind is not the right word.

On the other hand, it is common for people from Southern India to know 4 or 5 languages and it is not surprising.

Argorak5• 12 years ago

That still doesn't make any of those two outcomes mindblowing.

goblin89• 12 years ago

But quite a lot do, and do well, too. Why don't they deserve each a headline like this?

csa[0] Speaks Mandarin, Blows Everyone’s Mind

Doesn't seem to be interesting, does it. As long as you keep Zuckerberg (or Musk, or Gates, or Obama) in there, though…

<famous person> <does an unlikely thing>, Blows Everyone's Mind

…anything in place of “Speaks Mandarin” works.

Such canned formula headlines, and stories that primarily are newsworthy due to combination of elite persona and unexpectedness[1] just make me cringe, nice to know I'm not alone in this.

[0] Another HN user also commenting on this thread

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_values

LunaSea3• 12 years ago

Come to Luxembourg where kids are required to know 3 languages by age 10 and 4 by age 13.

Learning a language is not impressive in any way.

The only people who's mind was blown are probably people living in large countries like the US, the UK, France ...etc.

Torn• 12 years ago

The current headline (for posterity: "Zuckerberg Speaks Mandarin, Blows Everyone’s Mind") is very editorialised. Hopefully it gets changed.

to3m• 12 years ago

The headline is reproduced on HN verbatim, by policy, even when it's a sub-clickhole one...

lucb1e• 12 years ago

It didn't blow my mind. He learned a language, quite some people do that, even if the language is hard and remote.

Not sure that as a European I have a different view on things, but I very much agree with this comment.

readerrrr• 12 years ago

Everybody should be learning something in their free time, unfortunately watching media with the lowest common denominator( mostly daytime TV and sitcoms ) is the most prevalent and it is the worst at the same time. Youtube is becoming a replacement for that and allows and hosts really educating stuff( lectures, languages with subtitles ), but it is just too easy to switch to it from TV and keep watching crap.

chaghalibaghali• 12 years ago

Very impressive, Mandarin is one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Dif...

xiaoma2• 12 years ago

Mandarin is the easiest of any of the Chinese languages. It only has four tones instead of seven or more, there are a wealth of language teaching materials and a lot of natively-produced media, ranging from children's books to near-hollywood scale move productions.

Cantonese, on the other hand, has a decent amount of media but relatively little in terms of materials aimed at teaching foreigners.

Taiwanese learners have a decent amount of local television and music to lean on if/once they reach a high level of competence, but there isn't even a standardized written language! Instead there are the following horrible options:

1) Use an essentially unworkable system of trying to apply patchy etymological research of Taiwanese going back to middle Chinese to guess which characters modern syllable could be represented by.

2)Picking characters with similar Mandarin pronunciations, using a romanized script. This has the drawback that Taiwanese has several sounds and tones that Mandarin doesn't.

3) Use a well developed and self-consistent romanization (aka our alphabet) system developed by missionaries over a century ago. This is pretty decent but there are competing romanizations.

4) Use a mishmash of characters and roman letters together. This is very common.

One advantage both Cantonese and Taiwanese hold over smaller languages is that it's not too hard to find speaker communities in just about any major world city and many of those speakers are fully fluent only in that one language and find Mandarin to be a painful alternative. If you want to study an American Indian language like Blackfoot, you'll have the additional problem that every speaker of it is bilingual in English.

All in all, I don't think Mandarin ranks anywhere near the most difficult option for English speakers. It's certainly harder than romance languages, but in the big scheme of things it's of medium difficulty at worst.

song• 12 years ago

Definitely, learning Mandarin is way easier than any of the dialects. I tried to learn Teochew to communicate with my wife's family but the lack of learning materials and of romanization system similar to pinyin for Teochew makes it very difficult to learn.

sakri• 12 years ago

http://qz.com/285851/the-most-important-things-mark-zuckerbe...

|But those blown away by Zuck’s Chinese chinwag might want to know that though he’s clearly memorized a lot of relevant words, those were still shoehorned into a distinctly American grammatical order. Pronunciation is also a problem: He showed a plucky disregard for the tones that Mandarin has—one tonal slip-up had him saying that Facebook boasts eleven mobile users instead of 1 billion—and his enunciation was roughly on par with the clarity possible when someone’s stepping on your face.

Still, I'm impressed. Mandarin is (f'n) hard, takes balls to speak a language you don't master in front of a crowd (and subsequently all teh interwebs).

cafard• 12 years ago

Did his wife speak it in the home when growing up, or was she put the weekend schools I hear of ABC (American-born Chinese) kids going through? She could certainly help him if so.

csa• 12 years ago

Reposted from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8496518

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.

Swizec3• 12 years ago

A question if you will: What the hell is an ILR?

Also yay I learned a word - circumlocution.

pja• 12 years ago

This: http://www.govtilr.org/skills/ILRscale1.htm I would imagine.

sz4kerto• 12 years ago

He learned a language that's fundamentally different from his mother tongue.

Impressive. In my home country, you can't get your graduate degree without speaking 2 languages besides your mother tongue -- and the difference between English and Hungarian is not really smaller than English vs. Mandarin.

untog• 12 years ago

I think that everyone saying "I know tons of people that learnt a second language, so what" are missing the point. No, in a human being it is not that exceptional. However, a billionaire like Mark Zuckerberg might be well inclined to not bother, and expect everyone around him to speak his own language. But he went out of his way to learn.

No, we shouldn't give him the Nobel Peace Prize for it, but we can say "nice, good on you", and carry on our day.

reuven3• 12 years ago

It comes down to:

(1) Chinese people are blown away when a Westerner speaks Chinese, and (2) Americans are blown away by anyone who speaks Chinese.

I have been taking daily Mandarin lessons for the last few months, since I'm traveling increasingly often to Beijing to teach programming classes (in English), and want to be able to communicate more easily with my students and colleagues. I'm having a super-fun time with it, and definitely feel like I'm making progress. It's slow progress, but it's something.

My friends in the US and Israel seem to think I'm some kind of mutant super genius for being able to learn Chinese. I keep trying to tell them that a billion people have managed to do it, so it can't be that hard, but they are completely surprised that it's possible.

Moreover, even when I say something short and simple (with an undoubtedly very strong American accent and mediocre tones), my Chinese friends and colleagues are blown away, impressed by my ability to learn the language.

Zuckerberg seems to be where I hope to be in about a year or two -- namely, a with good vocabulary, decent but imperfect grammar, and a terrible accent. I can live with that.

The impressive thing here is the time needed to do this. Zuckerberg is a busy guy, and taking a few hours each week to study Mandarin isn't necessarily something that you would expect him to make time for. Then again, he just got married and doesn't yet have children. Hmm, maybe I am a mutant super genius for learning Chinese while married, consulting, and with three children...

Regardless, my wife took this news as proof that I'm doing the right thing. She's convinced that there will be even more people flocking to learn Mandarin, now that Zuckerberg has shown that it's possible.

raverbashing2• 12 years ago

Or maybe "Americans are blown away by anyone who speaks another language?"

reuven3• 12 years ago

Yes, but I live in Israel. It's normal here to expect native English speakers to learn Hebrew to some degree. But Chinese is seen as completely impenetrable, more than any other language. People use "Chinese" to mean something they don't understand.

Just two days ago, my postal carrier asked me a question about computers. (She's knows I'm in high tech.) I started to explain things, and she said, "What you're saying is Chinese to me." I said, "Actually, I'm learning Chinese," which she definitely didn't expect!

xiaoma2• 12 years ago

This is only true in bigoted European stereotypes of Americans. 20% of the country is bilingual. In port cities such as San Francisco or New York the ratio is much, much higher. It's just not that special. Non-Asians learning Chinese is still somewhat special, though much less so than it was in the 90s.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

Americans and foreign nationals. Anecdotal, friend returned from China many years ago after being paid to go teach English and some other minor courses. Got married while in China and after his stint there she was granted permission to move to America with him.

Long story short, they frequent different ethnic grocery stores and restaurants and some customers will make comment about them, directed at his wife, that they fully don't expect him to understand. Needless to say he does and usually replies kindly with how nice it is today and did the see that great item on a certain aisle.

So it works both ways, for many of us the need to learn a second language isn't there and the ambition to do so doesn't work well without the need.

wobbleblob• 12 years ago

Do people find it remarkable that he is able to speak a foreign language? Most people in the world are able to converse in more than one language. Or is it remarkable that a foreigner speaks Chinese?

Shish2k• 12 years ago

"Remarkable that an American realises a world outside the USA exists at all" would be the stereotype :P

(Not necessarily an accurate one; but as a European, that seems to be how the average American is viewed)

reuven3• 12 years ago

I'm much more amazed that so many people around the world have managed to learn English at a high enough level that they can work and study in it.

NicoJuicy• 12 years ago

Does anyone has some experience with this, i speak Dutch, German, English (Germanic languages) and French (Latin language).

I suppose it would be easier for me to learn Spanish or another language. But would it also help me to learn Mandarin?

sergiosgc• 12 years ago

Similarity in European languages helps. I speak Portuguese natively. It means Spanish is very easy and Italian a bit more difficult, but can be both picked up "by ear" just listening to TV shows. French is the first latin language that really required formal teaching to learn. English is taught at school from an early age, so while I recognize I'd never pick it up autonomously, it is now in the area of "easy languages".

Mandarin is probably so far from European languages that I can't even identify the expected learning roadblocks.

P.S: kudos on speaking Dutch. Amazingly difficult language. Tough pronunciation, strange grammar (for us coming from non-germanic languages at least).

kokey• 12 years ago

You probably learned a bit of the Germanic and Latin languages from a youngish age and many of it at school and over many years. It would help you to try learning some Mandarin just to realise how hard it is to learn for a very long list of reasons.

Isofarro• 12 years ago

I learned a few languages in school: French, Afrikaans, Xhosa, South Sotho. Been learning Mandarin on my own over the past year (using Pimsleur).

The main difference is the tonal system, reading it it sounds easy, but training your ear to pick it up takes time. It's hard to follow an audio when you're not picking up the nuances of the tones in context.

The language structure is kinda logical, so far. I haven't reached tenses or multiple clauses yet.

I found some pronunciation similar to French, for me ren (Zh: people) is similar sounding to rien (Fr: nothing)

IkmoIkmo• 12 years ago

Buddy of mine told me it was pretty bad, and that when the non-rehearsed questions came up he'd continue in English after a few words. Considering his wife is Chinese, I can't say this is mind-blowing. I'd downvote this as a celebrity-worship post.

gtirloni• 12 years ago

Is this TMZ now?

ilamont• 12 years ago

I learned Mandarin as a young adult, living in Taiwan and taking classes for about 10 hours per week. It took about 6 months to get to the level of vocabulary that Mark is using, and another 6 months to get to the point where I could handle a job interview.

Mandarin syntax is surprisingly easy, with no articles or weird things like irregular verbs or messy conjugations. The tones throw people off, and the written characters are extremely difficult to learn (for Westerners; Japanese, who have exposure to Chinese characters, do quite well at reading and writing). Fortunately, there is a Romanization/phonetic system called pinyin that makes it quite easy to get started with pronunciation and tones.

Yes, Mark is speaking with a very heavy accent and needs to work on his tones. But the fact that Mark was able to get to this level without living in China (he says he’s only visited 4 times, although it sounds like he’s able to practice with family members, including his wife’s paternal grandmother) is very impressive. I think it would be fair for many Chinese citizens to ask, if the busy CEO of a major American company who seldom visits China can learn Mandarin, why do many foreign businesspeople who have lived in China for years fail to learn the language?

drakeballew• 12 years ago

Here's a working translation of the Q&A, if there's not one already. https://medium.com/unbabel-news/b4cb8f223df2

Zuckerberg Speaks Mandarin, Blows Everyone’s Mind

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