{"id":3007,"date":"2014-11-05T10:56:43","date_gmt":"2014-11-05T10:56:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eurotalk.com\/blog\/?p=3007"},"modified":"2014-11-05T10:56:43","modified_gmt":"2014-11-05T10:56:43","slug":"just-how-bad-was-mark-zuckerbergs-mandarin-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/just-how-bad-was-mark-zuckerbergs-mandarin-anyway\/","title":{"rendered":"Just how bad was Mark Zuckerberg&#8217;s Mandarin anyway?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg shocked the world by taking part in\u00a0a 30-minute Q&amp;A session\u00a0in Mandarin Chinese. And we were all super impressed.<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=fr__vZKWdDE<\/p>\n<p>It was obvious, even to a non-Mandarin speaker,\u00a0that he wasn&#8217;t completely fluent, but he managed to keep going for almost the full half hour, and his audience at Tsinghua\u00a0University in Beijing seemed to enjoy his jokes, and his efforts at speaking their language. And it all sounded pretty good to me.<\/p>\n<p>Which just goes to show how much I know. Not too long after the video appeared online, <a title=\"Isaac Stone Fish on Mark Zuckerberg\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ibtimes.co.uk\/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-chinese-like-7-year-old-mouth-full-marbles-1471382\" target=\"_blank\">Isaac Stone Fish<\/a>, Asia Editor at Foreign Policy Magazine, gave his assessment of the Facebook CEO&#8217;s efforts: &#8216;in a word, terrible&#8217;. The headline of the piece was, &#8216;Mark Zuckerberg speaks Mandarin like a seven-year-old&#8217;. Ouch.<\/p>\n<p>Since the article was published, people have been jumping into the debate left, right and centre with their own opinions on how he did. James Fallows, writing for <a title=\"The Atlantic - response to Mark Zuckerberg speaking Chinese\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/international\/archive\/2014\/11\/mark-zuckerberg-speaking-chinese-brave-foolish-or-both\/382254\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Atlantic<\/a>, said that Zuckerberg spoke Mandarin &#8216;<span style=\"color: #000000;\">as if he had never heard of the all-important Chinese concept of tones&#8217;, whereas\u00a0Mark Rowswell, a Canadian comic who&#8217;s fluent in Mandarin and famous throughout China,\u00a0took to Twitter with a more balanced view.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">To clarify, Mark Zuckerberg&#39;s Chinese isn&#39;t very good. He&#39;s incredibly fluent for a Fortune 500 CEO. Which angle do you choose to take?<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; \u5927\u5c71 Dashan (@akaDashan) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/akaDashan\/status\/528691732368875520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 1, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, Kevin Slaten,\u00a0program coordinator at China Labor Watch, was more concerned about the message being given out by Stone Fish&#8217;s article. Mark Zuckerberg, after all, is used to bad press and is hardly likely to be put off by a few negative comments.\u00a0But Slaten looks at the bigger picture: &#8216;What is Stone Fish, a \u201cChina expert\u201d, telling these students of Chinese when he is tearing down a notable person for speaking non-standard Mandarin? He&#8217;s telling them, \u201cyou&#8217;ll be laughed at\u201d&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>Personally, I don&#8217;t know how good Zuckerberg&#8217;s Mandarin was. It sounded good to me, and as someone who really struggles with nerves when speaking another language, especially to native speakers, I&#8217;m pretty much in awe that he had the confidence to give it a go, particularly since it was a Q&amp;A session, not a prepared presentation. (Not that I think Mark Zuckerberg is particularly short on confidence, but you know what I mean.) Had the audience sat there shaking their heads, looking confused or angry, things might be different, but they clearly appreciated the effort he&#8217;d put in, so who am I\u00a0to judge?<\/p>\n<p>Making mistakes is part of learning a language. Everyone\u00a0has a funny or embarrassing story about a time they used the wrong word, or &#8211; in the case of languages like Mandarin or Thai &#8211; got the <a title=\"Language of the week: Thai\" href=\"https:\/\/eurotalk.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/03\/language-of-the-week-thai\/\" target=\"_blank\">tone slightly incorrect<\/a> and ended up saying something completely different than what they intended. There&#8217;s no shame in it, and in my experience, people appreciate the effort made. Mark Zuckerberg didn&#8217;t have to do that interview in Mandarin. He could have done what was expected of him and spoken English. And maybe he messed it up, but I bet everyone in that audience went home with a smile on their face (even if it was more from amusement than anything else).<\/p>\n<p>Isaac Stone Fish has since\u00a0<a title=\"Isaac Stone Fish response on Mark Zuckerberg\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/international\/archive\/2014\/11\/isaac-stone-fish-with-more-on-mark-zuckerbergs-chinese-language-show\/382267\/\" target=\"_blank\">responded to the criticism of his criticism<\/a>, stating that his issue was with the media outlets who described Zuckerberg&#8217;s Mandarin as fluent, when it wasn&#8217;t. Which is fair enough, and maybe some of his comments were taken out of context, but I think the main point stands.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a quote by\u00a0Abraham Lincoln: &#8216;<span style=\"color: #101010;\">Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.&#8217; I don&#8217;t agree,\u00a0at least not in the context of language learning. I say speak out, remove all doubt, have a laugh about it, and then learn from the experience. Otherwise, how will you ever get any better?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>So let&#8217;s give Mark Zuckerberg\u00a0&#8211; and every other language learner on the planet &#8211; a break.<\/p>\n<p>What did you make of the Facebook boss&#8217;s Mandarin? Have you ever surprised people by speaking their language?<\/p>\n<p>Liz<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg shocked the world by taking part in\u00a0a 30-minute Q&amp;A session\u00a0in Mandarin Chinese. And we were all super impressed. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=fr__vZKWdDE It was obvious, even to a non-Mandarin speaker,\u00a0that he wasn&#8217;t completely fluent, but he managed to keep going for almost the full half hour, and his audience at Tsinghua\u00a0University &#8230; <a title=\"Just how bad was Mark Zuckerberg&#8217;s Mandarin anyway?\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/just-how-bad-was-mark-zuckerbergs-mandarin-anyway\/\" aria-label=\"More on Just how bad was Mark Zuckerberg&#8217;s Mandarin anyway?\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[236,3,80],"tags":[75,525,891,892,893,2,730,894,895,420,896,897,898],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3007"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}