I was excited and pleasantly surprised to learn that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook recently spoke Mandarin. Last week Wednesday on October 22nd, Zuckerberg spoke Mandarin for half an hour in an Question and Answer segment at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. The Facebook CEO, whose net worth is approximately 33.3 billion cited three major reasons for learning Mandarin. He said that his first reason was that his wife, Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American is from a Chinese family and that he learned the language to communicate a lot easier and establish a closer relationship with her family. Another reason was that he was fascinated by Chinese culture which really reminded me of myself because this was also one of my major reasons for learning Mandarin. Lastly, he also said that he loves to challenge himself and that Mandarin is one of the hardest languages one can learn which is yet another reason I have decided to learn it. However, there is the assumption by some news sites that another major reason he is learning the language is to forge closer relationships with officials in China in hope that they will remove the ban on his company, Facebook in China. I am definitely inclined to agree with this view.
Mark Zuckerberg, who was recently appointed as a member of the advisory board at the Tsinghua university posted the video on Facebook the same day as his Mandarin speech in Beijing. I heard about the existence of the video by a fellow classmate on Saturday but unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to watch the video till the day after. I found the video to be quite entertaining and one of the first things I noticed was that he was not 100% confident speaking Mandarin. To be honest, this made me feel a whole lot better about my own humble attempts to learn this challenging language especially after hearing some of the comments on news site such as the BBC News and the Telegraph. I was most astonished to find out some of the unflattering words which were used to describe Zuckerberg's attempt at speaking the Chinese language. There were mainly mixed views about his fluency in speaking the language. Most sites stated that he did a good job with the grammar and vocabulary however there were various negative comments. Some of them were, "his pronunciation sounded as though his mouth was full of marbles" and that he was definitely "out of his comfort zone". A few news sites stated that his tones were a bit wobbly and that he sounded like an articulate seven year old.
Overall, although most of the feedback I read about his speech was on the unpleasant side, I think that Mark Zuckerberg was quite pleased by his attempt to speak Mandarin in front of a public audience for approximately 30 minutes in Beijing. This also made me proud at my own personal efforts in learning the language and sharing my journey on this blog and other social media platforms as well.
Here are some links to the news sites on Mark Zuckerberg Dialogue in Mandarin:-
1 comment:
Zucks get ON!
Post a Comment