81–90 of 188 posts
Even if Zuckerberg's main motivation was to learn his wife's language, I believe this will effectively raise the bar for CEOs in the years ahead. I wouldn't be surprised if this seemingly unnecessary skill could signify new business opportunities for large corporations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're missing the point. The number of Westerners who become conversational in Chinese is astoundingly low compared to vice-versa. It's known to be quite difficult. Being able to publicly answer questions at a Q&A without falling back to English once is a feat that takes years of learning and practice. It is amazing to me that Mark has been able to find the time and dedication for this while simultaneously r…
It's interesting sometimes it's harder to go from language A -> B than B -> A. If you're born Japanese then you lost the language lottery. Japanese has a limited set of sounds and there are very few close languages grammatically; Korean being the major one. So even the global language, English, is a massive challenge. It's easier for a Chinese person to learn Japanese than the other way round. (Japanese speakers at l…
Tones, yes. Sounds, not as much. English has a staggering inventory of distinct sounds, including more distinct vowels than most languages and a fairly impressive array of consonants. Furthermore, aside from having many consonant sounds, it has many consonant clusters, both at the start and end of syllables, that are quite difficult for speakers of many languages (including Chinese) to learn.
Not impossible, obviously. But the sound system of English is definitely nontrivial for speakers of Mandarin to master.
his tones are off, but he has a pretty impressive vocabulary
Highly impressed. I used to brush him off as just another wunderkind who got lucky. In retrospect, his business acumen, especially when acquiring Instagram for a then pricely sum of a billion dollars has made me realize that he truly is special.
What surprises the most that he is able to distinguish sounds that are effectively all same for most non-Chinese people. Research says our ability to distinguish sounds in other languages ceases after first 8 months and that's why it's harder to understand someone talking in foreign language. Did Zuck had any exposure to Chinese as a kid? Any info on how he learned Chinese? My guess is that he probably decided to tal…
For me this obstacle went away with sufficient immersion and practice. I started learning Chinese at age 19, the following year I went to China as an exchange student and studied Chinese / Mandarin full time. By the time I came back I was fluent in the language, more fluent than all of the second-generation Chinese-Americans I knew, and with a native-sounding accent, although my vocabulary was still not quite native-speaker level.
I don't know exactly what Zuck is doing to study, but what I did was I went to school in China and spoke almost entirely in Mandarin all day, wrote essays in Chinese, read news articles and novels in Chinese, made Chinese friends, dated Chinese women (and eventually married one).
You really have to live in a foreign language for a period of several years in order to truly learn it.
I don't know why people keep saying that this is very impressive unless he was learning Chinese as he was also running Facebook. His tones and grammar still need a good amount of work. I feel like I am not getting the impact since I go to a university were 15% (very rough estimate) of the student body take four years of Chinese in about 2 years (all languages are compressed to 2 years at Princeton). edit: After readi…
Is Facebook blocked in China these days? It used to be. Must be weird to be there representing a blocked company.
This is actually a publicity stunt done by a video production company in SF. He is saying complete gibberish, and the audience is instructed to react or laugh at certain points by signs outside of the field of view of the camera. Completely fake, but comes across as very impressive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't speaking relevant foreign languages considered a plus in business settings? That seems to be the layman perception, at least.
I've been told by Americans doing business in China that, even if you have pretty good Chinese, you don't have good business Chinese unless you specifically know that you do. So you'll get a translator anyway. Understanding the culture is important to understanding the product you provide, if it's at all different, so that can be pretty important.
Chinese love when you speak the language- but that does not unfortunately translate into the sort of tangible business advantages that many students of Mandarin hope for. It's a wonderful language, and loads of fun to learn- but the ROI is not as high as other areas of study.