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Mark Zuckerberg Speaks Mandarin At Tsinghua University In Beijing
HughPickens.com writes Abby Phillip reports at the Washington Post that that Mark Zuckerberg just posted a 30-minute Q&A at Tsinghua University in Beijing in which he answered every question exclusively in Chinese — a notoriously difficult language to learn and particularly, to speak. "It isn't just Zuckerberg's linguistic acrobatics that make this a notable moment," writes Philip. "This small gesture — although some would argue that it is a huge moment — is perhaps his strongest foray into the battle for hearts and minds in China." Zuckerberg and Facebook have been aggressively courting Chinese users for years and the potential financial upside for the business. Although Beijing has mostly banned Facebook, the company signed a contract for its first ever office in China earlier this year. A Westerner speaking Mandarin in China — at any level — tends to elicit joy from average Chinese, who seem to appreciate the effort and respect they feel learning Mandarin demonstrates. So how well did he actually do? One Mandarin speaker rates Zuckerberg's language skills at a seventh grader's speech: "It's hard not see a patronizing note in the Chinese audience's reaction to Zuckerberg's Mandarin. To borrow from Samuel Johnson's quip, he was like a dog walking on its hind legs: It wasn't done well, but it was a surprise to see it done at all."
"One Mandarin speaker rates Zuckerberg's language skills at a seventh grader's speech:"
The linked article is headlined "Mark Zuckerberg Speaks Mandarin Like a Seven Year Old." Significant difference between seven years old and a seventh grader.
He's a sellout in any language.
China and it's totalitarian, authoritarian government and lack of individual rights make great synergy for facebook.com
also: his wife is Chinese
Thank you Dave Raggett
If the Chinese language is really such a notoriously difficult language to learn (and to speak) there ought to be no one using it anymore, right?
I dunno about you, but I do think /. has gone way too hyperbole !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
To borrow from Samuel Johnson's quip, he was like a dog walking on its hind legs: It wasn't done well, but it was a surprise to see it done at all.
Maybe his language ability is like a mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it.
It's not surprising he's been learning Mandarin. He'll need it to speak to all of his new off-shore employees when he replaces all of his expensive labor in the U.S.
Get back to work on the universal translator motherfucker!
Respect? I call it pandering for coin.
Who gives a shit? Seriously? Mark Zuckerberg did a thing that has nothing to do with tech or anything important, are we going to get reports of him hang gliding or surfing next? Oh boy, a person in the tech world has a reasonably impressive but totally uninteresting life skill, lets make a big deal about it for no reason.
His wife is Chinese.
I am a Mandarin speaker. Yes, his accent was horrible. However, this is what impressed me: He understood everything the interviewer asked in one pass. His response was a genuine expression of his thoughts rather than a textbook answer. He did not have to rely on inserting English words. His grammar was basically correct.
Like the one W had?
http://www.salon.com/2004/10/09/bulge/
what is the point of this question?
are you saying that we should compare China and the US on issues like human rights, pollution, civil rights, democracy, and compare the military actions of the countries throughout history? How far back do we go?
is that what you're implying here? that if we did some sort of "side by side" comparison that China would ***NOT*** be a totalitarian, authoritarian state?
China is a teeming, polluted, authoritarian clusterfsk of humanity...good synergy for facebook.com
Thank you Dave Raggett
i read she was Chinese somewhere...hmm...
Thank you Dave Raggett
It has a simpler sound system than English and fewer grammar rules. Being around a long time it has a ton of idioms you have to individually memorize.
Fuck you Zoidberg
They usually dont admit people unless thay have multiple talents. Mark was good an computers, learning languages, and probably a few other things.
How do you say "Dumb fucks" in mandarin?
Listen, just because he's learning the language doesn't make him Chinese.
Remember this? Hilarious.
Facebook office in China? Should be a rousing success with his friends the Chicoms. I wonder how many people will be put in jail or executed because of Facebook by the time the office closes?
an ill wind that blows no good
I don't know about 7th Graders in China, but 7th Graders in North America are barely past the nose-picking stage.
Even the most articulate 7th grader in North America is smart enough to not do dangerous things like fingers in the electrical socket.
A guy worth many billions of dollars can pay for someone to teach them a language, and has time to learn the language. Who'da thunk it possible? What a grand and glorious day for all of the people of the world.. er wait a minute...
The proceeding message was brought to you by a cynical old guy who learned to read/write and speak 2 1/4th additional languages (German, Spanish *and currently working on Russian*) on his own time without billions of dollars to do so. All while raising a kid as a single parent and working full time. Sorry, he's nothing special in terms of intelligence and definitely lacking in morals. Being high on his ego does nothing for me.. Next!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
"The best classroom is the bedroom."
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Really, you have to come up with something better than that, because that is a horrible way of trying to measure a country. DPRK has not bombed anyone since the 1950s, but in your book they are okay right?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
To borrow from Samuel Johnson's quip, he was like a dog walking on its hind legs: It wasn't done well, but it was a surprise to see it done at all
Hmm. Well, few Chinese speakers ever learn to speak English very well either. Not without intensive, lengthy immersion, anyway. But it's no longer socially acceptable to make fun of them for it, nor very logical, for that matter.
Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg has a face that looks like it needs to be slapped, but damn this is a tough crowd.
Good for him for putting effort into that.
Wow. [White] Anglo guy come to China and speaks Mandarin ("Holly Shit! Look, THE DOG'S DOING CALCULUS!!11"), but a Chinese tech CEO (Jack Ma? Charles Chao? Robin Li? pick one) coming to The USA and speaking English in a meeting... well, obviously that's not news-report worthy. Hell, everyone important in the world speaks English without question, right? And, if not - what's their excuse??
Holly crap Anglo world, get over yourselves, will you? Of course Mark Zuckerburg speaks Chinese... in China. What would we expect him to speak, French?? Notice how everybody focusing on how he spoke, rather than what he said.
English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over, and rummages through their pockets for loose grammar. - Paraphrase of a quote by James Davis Nicoll
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Then you should learn what they are doing in Africa
Then you should learn what they are doing in Africa.
The former PM of Australian Kevin Rudd could also speak Mandarin. During one diplomatic spat, the Chinese embassy reminded him that:
"To speak Chinese is not to know China. Many examples can be found of people who speak Mandarin to a high level but who do not understand how China works. They may have learned their Chinese shut up in their study reading the Analects."
I think the Chinese regard this as an irreverent amusement more than anything meaningful
Wrong.
When we're young, we benefit from massive plasticity in our language learning skills, and of course any child who learns Mandarin (and sometimes Cantonese as well) is going to make a much better native speaker than I am ever going to make, despite the fact that I've devoted years to it and am highly motivated.
It's not just learning words. It is how things are said, references to metaphors and myths and such, and the fact that it is not a "spelled" language; the characters you're familiar with each represent a word part or a word that means one thing on its own, often something else in combination, and very few of them are used the way we use them in western speech. About 2000 of them constitute (approximately) high school literacy. But there are about 50 thousand of them. Bad enough? Oh no. A while back, Those In Power decided they were to o hard, so they "simplified" a bunch of them. Great, right? So you only have to learn the simplified ones, right? Wrong. The traditional ones are everywhere, and plus, some places in asia use the old ones, not the new ones. And then...
(Very) simple example. In English, I I ask you if you want soup, you might say "No." Easy, right? So you how to say no, (Bu Shi) Now you know what to say if I ask you about the soup and you don't want it, right? Wrong. In Mandarin, the question of if you want it is composed, literally, "want not want", (yao bu yao) to which you are expected to answer either "not want" or "want." (Bu yao) or (yao). And down the rabbit hole we go. :)
Trust me. As an adult English speaker, you go into learning Mandarin thinking it's easy, you're in for a serious encounter with your limitations.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
President Obama is drafting a new Secret Executive Order banning the teaching of all languages other than 'American' i.e. U.S.A. style usage of "English" in all pre-elementary, elementary, secondary, post secondary and graduate schools in U.S.A.
Communications in a foreign language, any foreign language subjugates National Security and will NOT be tolerated.
"Either speak 'English' or 'shut the fuck up'", Obama shouted to admonishes his diminutive supplicants of the Cabinet.
The PLA power wonks in the audience have the same respect for the people in their own country, use them (kill them), then discard them when they are of no further use. Zucker the Sucker will get the same from them in the end.
And every time he farts we get to hear it as news?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The best part of this story is that it gets a "Firefly" tag.
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
and there I was, hoping the news was that he was showcasing some very advanced speech to speech translator...
... notoriously difficult language to learn and particularly, to speak.
Is that so? I would be interested to hear what that assessment is based on - having learned the languages myself, I didn't find it hard, on the contrary.
Chinese is notable for having probably the simplest syntax of any language, pronunciation, this is no harder than are other languages, and the national transcription system, pinyin, is very consistent and accurately represents the pronunciation of the words, unlike for example English - for an illustration, see Mark Twain's famous satire on a similar subject:
http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/1...
Even Chinese characters aren't all that difficult - they are highly structured, and you only need to learn about 1000 to understand most texts; the average desktop user probably already recognises more than that number of icons without even sweating. I think the idea that Chinese is incredibly hard to learn is simply based on ignorance, and perhaps also some sort of fear that one might sound silly if one were to pronounce foreign languages correctly; English speakers seem to go out of their way to mispronounce ALL other languages, including German and French.
Compare Chinese with English:
Chinese: There are no grammatical tenses (past -, present -, future - ...)
English: Verbs have a different form depending on whether it talks about the past, present, etc.
Chinese: Nouns have the same form always. Really always: no singular/plural, nominative/accusative/genitive/dative/... ...
English:
Chinese: Spelled as it is pronounced
English: Need I elaborate?
And in English, the fact that it is a bastard language, with imported features from a large number of other languages, means that the same grammatical structures are governed by several basically unrelated rules: one house, several houses, but on the other hand, one forum, several fora - or should that be forums? And how about 'one virus'? If English were like Chinese, the question simply wouldn't arise. Chinese is easy to learn, far easier than English.
And it isn't that I don't like English - I love the language, but that is exactly because it is so convoluted and almost creatively messy.
An amusing quote I read once:
English doesn't borrow from other languages.
English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over, and rummages through their pockets for loose grammar.
- Paraphrase of a quote by James Davis Nicoll
AND their words.
I've posted two lengthy responses in this thread already, so this one will be brief: You're an idiot. No, really. :)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
"They trust me. Dumb fucks." --Zuckerberg
LoL, I love that quote. I have often said America is basically the Borg, we will take the uniqueness of other cultures and assimilate them in to our collective to benefit ourselves. We borrow (steal?) cultural ideas freely from other countries with no real concern for "authenticity", either theirs or ours. To an extent that is the thing I love most about English and the U.S., I wouldn't change either. You will never hear me complain about corruption of the Queen's English, and based on history the Queen shouldn't either.
People in the U.S. are factually at a disadvantage here. English, like it or not, sure has seem to become the international language. MOST counties have very developed programs for teaching English and there is often a tangible benefit to leaning it. For English speakers in the U.S., it is simply very rare for them to need, benefit from or really have the opportunity to practice other languages. It is simply nice when someone makes the attempt.
I agree. You should try living here. You can't understand anybody anymore. Whether I am buying "gash-a-reen", "a-pizza-da-pie-a", getting my shirts "creened", I have to ask that they repeat themselves, because I couldn't understand what the fuck they said. Chinese restaurants, Japanese restaurants, the lawn care service . . . I can't take it anymore. God forbid you live in Newark and actually pronounce "cavatelli" the way it is spelled, instead of that God-awful mutant pseudo-Italian.
How many fucking languages am I supposed to learn? We border Mexcio, and nearly Cuba, but I am still more that 1,000 miles away from needing to speak Mexican. Buried inside Canada there is a French population, but . . . well, they're French, so they can go fuck themselves, because they're better than me.
So yeah, it should be news-worthy when someone actually tries to learn it, even if it is the international business language.
Thanks for bringing it up. You one honorable Chinaman.
Mark Zuckerberg is a 7th grade dog. Sounds about right.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Japanese particles have no strong correlation to anything much in English. They are grammatically important words, vaguely similar in function to English prepositions. Sometimes particles might be like conjunctions (to is kinda like "and"), sometimes they might be like punctuation (ka on the end is a verbal question mark), sometimes they have no good translation (wa marks topic, or contrastive subject).
FWIW, wa is more often considered a topic marker than a subject marker. Samples:
Watashi wa gakk ni ikimasu.
I [topic] school to go. > I go to school. -- basic topic is "I", which fits as subject in the English.
Watashi wa unagi desu.
I [topic] eel is/am/are. > I am an eel. -- basic topic is "I", which definitely doesn't fit as subject in the English here. A proper translation would be more like:
As for me, it'll be the eel. > I'll have the eel. -- such as when asked for one's order at a restaurant.
The particle ga is closer to a subject marker in function. For instance, Watashi ga unagi desu could only be interpreted to mean "I am an eel." Meanwhile, ni is vaguely like indirect object.
And, as you note, Japanese is incredibly more context-dependent than English. Oftentimes, anything that can be omitted from a sentence will be omitted, particularly anything that is clear from context, that has been previously established in the text or conversation or what-have-you. This makes Japanese into English interpretation a real bitch -- your example of "no shit I mean XXX" can get really tricky. If you miss the first part of what someone says, and you've lost the thread, you're absolutely hosed. English grammatically demands a lot more context-providing words, even when we think we're omitting detail. He's going to the store could be rendered in Japanese as just Ikimasu (go/goes/going/will go), if the context allows -- we don't even have the gender of the subject here in Japanese, making it much harder to try to guess.
More on topic to the greater thread, I've studied both Mandarin and Japanese, and I found Mandarin *much* easier to wrap my head around. Mandarin is a kind of language called an analytic language -- words are pretty broken down, even more than English, with no inflectional endings like "-ing" or "-s" or "-ed" etc. for tense, and no differences in a single word for singular or plural, that kind of thing. It's very streamlined in some ways. The Mandarin word mi can mean "buy", or "bought", or "will buy", without the need for different tenses -- tense is supplied by context, such as adding in the word for "today" or "tomorrow".
Japanese, meanwhile, is a very synthetic language -- words are glommed together with other elements to express different things like active/passive and adjectives, or even basics like tense or social context. One fun example is highly infected verb-based forms in Japanese, like saserareyasukattanda, which means "it's the case that he/she/it/they was/were easily made to do [something]".
Social context in Japanese is very important, kinda like Spanish tú vs. usted or French tu vs. vous, only on steroids and totally whacked out. Just looking at tense and social context in Japanese, the English terms "go" or "will go" can be variously expressed by the Japanese iku ("go" when talking to friends or familiars; present and future tense in Japanese are generally the same),
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Note: "school" in Japanese should have been rendered as gakk, not just gakk. Even better, it should be rendered with a macron (overbar) on the "o" instead, to indicate a long "o". For those interested about what long vowels are in Japanese, see the Wikipedia article on the "mora" in linguistics.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
YMMV, but in my experience, you only need 2 verb tenses ... to be "yourself" in another language...
That would explain why Chinese is so difficult then -- not enough tenses. How can you be yourself in a language that only has one tense?!?
No, you've got it all wrong -- Chinese with its simplified verbs is much more relaxing to speak. How can you be yourself when speaking any language that is two-tense, or even more?
:-P
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Your first language is a hereditary trait. You pick it up largely by accident from mimicking adults when you're an infant.
You don't really get to choose what language you speek unless you go to extra effort to learn additional languages as a child or adult. As such the extinction threshold for a language based on how hard it is for adults to learn is very high.
She was screaming "Wrong hole!" Maybe try it with the lights on next time...
- T
those questions are to point out the absurdity of OP's (and your) defense of China
obviously China is older than the US...you know that's not the point
the point is, you and OP are irrational in your defense of China
Thank you Dave Raggett
except it was total trolling...as other's on this thread have pointed out, it is completely accurate to describe her as Chinese
you and OP are just trolling to deflect the accurate criticism of both facebook and China
Thank you Dave Raggett
but instead just have the thought in your mind and then express it with the tools you have in the language you need to speak even if they're very limited
well said...this is excellent advice...and phrased succinctly
we can 'force' ourselves to think in language, but our thoughts are deeper than language...it's taking the step to see that all language is a tool for communication, not inherent to our brain
Thank you Dave Raggett
except Americans have more personal freedom than any other citizen in the known universe
Thank you Dave Raggett