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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 Ryuugami on Friday October 24 2014, @04:19PM
I'd recommend anyone learning any language to start out by speaking and only learn the language once they can understand most things said to them.
I'd modify this a bit. I'd say that it's enough to get a feeling for the language, no need to actual understand it. I've been watching anime in Japanese with English subtitles for four or five years before I began to study the language, and at that point I'd say I had a vocabulary of less than a hundred words and my knowledge of grammar was as good as non-existent. But from all the "listening practice" (even without understanding what was said), I could speak and listen at a decent level about a month after I began study. The next eleven months were just refinement and reading/writing (which necessarily takes some time).
TL;DR: From my anecdotal evidence, you don't even need to understand; you just need to listen.
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