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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 Zuckerberg actually do? One Mandarin speaker rates Zuckerberg's language skills at the level of a seven year old: "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."
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 24 2014, @01:44PM
My take is different. I came to Mandarin after learning Japanese for years, and found Mandarin significantly easier. Yes, tonal differences throw you at first. The lack of an alphabet is daunting at first. But they're both consistent and have their own internal logic. Quickly you come to roll with the tones (like when you learn that when two falling-rising tones occur next to each other, the first becomes a rising tone because it's easier to say). The characters stop being incomprehensible and turn into an alphabet, albeit an alphabet with a whole lot of letters. The grammar is dead easy next to Indo-European languages with their gendered articles, and a million verb and tense conjugations and noun-adjective agreement.
Classical Chinese is different, but you mostly encounter it in spoken Mandarin as proverbs or idioms. In other words, you don't really need it, much the same way you don't really need to know Latin proverbs ("veni, vidi, vici") to be perfectly capable in American English.
When I hit the ground in Beijing I spoke zero, and 8 months later was a paid lecturer on modernity and epistemological change at China's equivalent of M.I.T., so I believe that Zuckerberg was able to give a decent accounting of himself.
Part of what the communists did when they took over was to simplify the characters and standardize vocabulary to boost literacy. And I have to hand that one to them because I think it worked.
Japanese, now, that's an entirely different ball of wax...
Washington DC delenda est.