Also, Mandarin is a tonal language, along with having vastly different grammar than Germanic languages. While English has plenty of influence from Romance languages, most of it is strictly vocabulary; English, at its core, is a Germanic language. Thus it'd be rather hard to prove that German is more difficult for an English speaker to learn than Chinese. However, I would love to hear his arguments to the contrary, or anybody else's for that matter!
I think that talking about the relative difficulty of a language as a whole is not really workable. There are different aspects which order differently.
For example, if you already speak English then you'll find German vocabulary far easier to learn. There will be a lot of shared or similar words that you can build on. In Mandarin, there are almost no common words, so you basically have to start from scratch.
On the other hand, Mandarin grammar is pretty simple. No conjugations, no genders, just slightly different word order from what you're used to. If you know how to say "I eat noodles" and you know how to say "yesterday" then you know how to say "I ate noodles yesterday". We spent a long time learning how to conjugate the various past tenses in French class, and I believe German is similar.
I think there's no contest when it comes to reading and writing. Learning to read and write Mandarin is almost like learning a whole separate language from the spoken version.
I think the easy grammar helps give Mandarin a big advantage, especially if you're learning it for casual conversations. But that advantage is greatly reversed in other areas. Much will depend on what the individual language learner finds easy and hard to learn.
edit: After reading more comments, I understand that it is rare, but I can't say it is a much more significant achievement than if he learned another language such as German or Arabic.
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 talk with wife and relatives only Chinese for a long period of time. According to many this is the best way to learn new language (as opposed to passively watching videos and audio tapes). Another guess is that he may have some really top Chinese teacher giving few hours of tuition per week.
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.
Learning a new language, especially Mandarin, in adulthood is certainly an accomplishment for anyone, but Zuckerberg is not exactly the first person to do it.
Of course, we should always encourage ourselves and others to learn foreign languages, even if only to dabble.
Unfortunately, this is just gimmick, and bad gimmick at that. Compare to a completely normalised (and far more impressive!!) display of Chinese-language skill. It's implied that they're mostly housewives: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5na5nHZsww#t=5m30s
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 running one of the most successful tech companies ever.
This isn't on hacker news because the East is exotic or Chinese language is mysterious.
The skill-level displayed in the Facebook video is about what you'd expect from a student having completed about four semesters of Chinese education from a mid-tier state school.
The other video is much more impressive as a display of language skill. There's a natural fluency on display, and it comes from a bunch of regular folks who have the benefit of an immersive learning environment and probably not that much more.
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 least have a big leg up on reading Chinese)
I wonder if it's easier to go from Chinese to English, they certainly have more sounds/tones an English speaker will have never spoken. In reality, major different is probably a power difference, it's a lot more useful to know English than it is to know Mandarin in the general case. (If a Chinese student goes to France they'll be using English)
Is it harder to learn a foreign language if you manage a huge business and are insanely rich or is it harder if you work to make do, have kids and not a lot of free time?
Is it a business strategy, a gimmick that the company paid for? A real personal investment?
Everyone learning a completely foreign language impresses me. Zuckerberg just scores really, really low on my utterly personal "Am I impressed" scale.
For a more eloquent response (not mine), see this:
Characters are hard. There are thousands of them, with only loose auditory or semantic meaning. Learning to write and read Chinese is almost always going to involve rote memorization, hopefully using spaced repetition.
I've been studying Mandarin in a non-intensive but formal class for 6 years, speak a bit better than mark to Mark here and almost definitely with a larger vocabulary (though this could be 100% biased by the intimidation of a large fluent crowd in his case), and cannot even hope to read a simple Chinese novel or newspaper. I've heard anecdotally that doing so requires working knowledge of about 10,000 characters.
For further comparison, Kevin Rudd's Chinese-language interview for Mandarin News Australia (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bro4mkb_VKc) and then-Taipei-mayor Ma Ying-jeou's English-language interview for Council on Foreign Relations (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80GysZ3sldM#t=10m). Both Kevin Rudd and Ma Ying-jeou display fluency and mastery of foreign language.
Even Kevin Rudd has to engage in the same ritual formalities: the denial that his 普通話得實在是太好的. (馬英九 is never subject to this.)
Thankfully, Rudd's interview moves past this, and we never have to hear him answer 你喜歡什麼中國菜? or 在工作之外你會有什麼活動?
That's interesting to me as this week I stumbled into Afrikaans, which likewise lacks genders and conjugations and only apepars to have two tenses ( present and perfect ).
Which makes me wonder why other languages have evolved to such levels of complexity, since it seems entirely possible to conduct the affairs of a state without have a distinction between 'I eat' and 'he eats'.
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.
The Chinese students I know who are learning English have to work incredibly hard at it. I don't think it's any easier for them to learn to speak English than for me to learn to speak Chinese. Reading is definitely harder in Chinese.
* The set of sounds in Chinese is actually quite limited both in variety and in word structure. Yes, there are some sounds that don't appear in English and of course tones, but there are more sounds in English that don't appear in Chinese and far more pronunciation patterns. Words that don't end in vowels or n/ng, for example. Chinese doesn't have them.
* English grammar is far more complex than Chinese. Articles and verb tense stand out to me, but a proper English teacher would be better able to list the challenges.
On the other hand, both languages have mitigating factors that make it easier:
* International English / Business English is a pretty well-established subset of the language.
* Chinese has a common subset of about 1000-2000 characters that you can use to read newspapers and signs.
* Both languages are lingua francas, so in everyday use people are relatively forgiving of second language learners. (Mandarin Chinese is the lingua franca of the Chinese empire, which includes tens of minority languages.)
Understanding the culture is important to understanding the product you provide, if it's at all different, so that can be pretty important.
Why do we go googoogaga over an English speaker learning a foreign language to a competent level, when this is something millions of people do regularly? Mark isn't the first person to learn a language in the middle of a busy job and life schedule.
Doucheness not quite over - it's a big achievement, yeah, but Chinese isn't actually that hard, it's a bit of a myth perpetuated because (a) there's not enough people learning it (b) a lot of teachers are quite shit in my experience (c) hand writing is difficult. in reality spoken Chinese is very simple, grammar is easy, common vocabulary is easily learnt and repeated frequently....
As with my other comments, taking Chinese as a whole it is difficult, but breaking it down into components, some parts are crazy hard and parts are quite easy. I think once you get past the hump of becoming used to tones and some of the initial grammar weirdness (for English speakers) then there aren't many grammar complexities, vocabulary is very repetitive and even poor pronunciation isn't as big a deal as you think - witness Mark making lots of tone errors but being understood quite well.
Every human language is hard to learn once you go beyond the basics, but what makes a language hard to learn for you is the distance with your mother tongue.
And guess what? Mandarin is one of the most difficult language to learn for a native English speaker.
http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang...
No one cares if a Chinese CEO (or anyone for that matter) speaks English, no matter the difficulty and effort the learning entails. Contrast this indifference with the flattery of the converse in this thread, and it's quite illuminating of the world we live in.
That being said, good on him for making the effort.
I don't buy it. The story is prominent person does something you don't expect, not prominent white person does something you don't expect.
Some of that is because they're not used to non-native speakers, but much of it is just the structure of the language and room for error-correction. I'd assume it's the same for Mandarin with so many short words and tones.
Languages are vast oceans of meaning and composition -- 90 hours simply is not enough for Chinese (or any language, really, reality itself is too complex to describe with a system that simple).
I'd recommend learning the characters using Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi (this should take about 100-200 hours), and then shifting to HSK (which should be pretty easy post-character learning) + full sentences.
If you like Pimsleur, keep with it, although I get made fun of for sounding like a northerner a bit from using it for pronunciation help when I was beginning. :)
No criticism but if you didn't know I thought you might want to.
It's like they thought to themselves 'How can we do a paywall but replace all of the users usual disappointment with utter irritation?'
tl;dr - Definitely ILR 1+, probably an ILR 2. Pronunciation needs a ton of work, but that's not the only aspect that is measured when analyzing speech. The foreign policy article (linked in another comment) is overly critical, imho.
Detailed:
ILR LEVEL
He's definitely at least an ILR 1+. He shows signs of ILR 2 characteristics (and is probably an ILR 2), but it's hard to tell if he can sustain them in a wide range of contexts. While his pronunciation needs A LOT of work, the language itself is comprehensible to a sympathetic native listener. I strongly disagree with the Foreign Policy article that says it was "terrible". I would say that it's actually kind of amazing given that he's the CEO of a huge company. I would roughly say that he is on par with a good / above average 3rd year student at a school with a really good Chinese program. The original article says 2nd year, but this would be a superstar 2nd year student who was either a heritage speaker or had spent a lot of time in China (e.g., as a homestay or study abroad).
DISCOURSE STRUCTURE AND STYLE
He is able to sustain the dialogue for a long time. He is able to circumlocute decently (this really opens up the ability to communicate), but I would really like to see his range of circumlocution. He is able to string together his sentences in moderately cohesive paragraphs. He does not demonstrate the ability to combine paragraphs cohesively at a high level (signs of an ILR 3), but I don't think the tasks really required it.
His style of answering questions was very American -- very direct. I don't think that a Chinese speaker who has lived exclusively in China (i.e., not educated or trained in the "West") would answer the same questions similarly. In this case, I actually think that it's best for him to answer in an American way even if he could answer in a Chinese style, but that's a different and longer discussion.
Early on when he tells the story of his wife and her grandmother, he really comes across as quite charming.
GRAMMAR
He does decently enough. There are errors, but it's not hard to understand what he is saying -- especially for a sympathetic native listener. The sample didn't really demonstrate a wide range of grammar, but the tasks didn't necessarily require a wide range. He is able to say complex sentences (i.e., two independent clauses), and he is able to speak in different timeframes (normally tenses, but Chinese tenses are not like English). This all points to a solid ILR 2, but grammar is definitely not the toughest part of Mandarin.
VOCABULARY
He has a decent vocabulary -- it's solid for the task. I wonder what his vocabulary is like outside of the topics of personal bio information, Facebook, and Facebook business. If he wants to get to ILR 2+ or ILR 3, he will need to work on the accuracy and diversity of his vocabulary.
PRONUNCIATION
This is easily his weakest point. He has a HEAVY American accent. He mispronounces a lot of words. His tones are WAY off. He seems completely unable to say English loan words in Chinese (e.g., Facebook, Google, etc.). It's actually kind of hard to listen to. That being said, I would say that it is all comprehensible to a sympathetic native listener.
SUMMARY
Overall, really good for someone who is not studying full time and has a very involved full time job. I wonder how much of it was practiced or rehearsed -- a lot of the questions are ones that he definitely _should_ practice (e.g., the story about why he started studying Chinese), since they are standard questions that would be asked to him and/or the Facebook CEO. Regardless, speaking in a foreign language to a large group of people is not easy, and he came across really well.
RECOMMENDATIONS
He can work on his pronunciation in several ways:
- Listen more. Even if it's on in the background, it will help. Right now, I don't think he has a good intuitive sense when he is mispronouncing a word.
- When working with a teacher, do lower level language tasks, and act like a native speaker whose voice/accent he likes. Research suggests that this lowers affective filters for pronunciation.
- Work with suprasegmentals with a pronunciation program that visualize what he's saying. It can be enlightening.
- Practice over pronouncing words. If he does what he perceives as a "caricature" of pronouncing the word, he will probably be closer to accurate.
Other than that, listen more, read more, and I think he will become a rock-solid ILR 2 with room for growth if he wants it.
That's my quick-and-dirty. I am very interested in the informed opinions of others.
It appears that he struggles at times but never reverts to English.
As for Zuckerberg's Mandarin, well done, but he needs to work on his accent and tones.
http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/index.php?siteurl=facebo...
Just want to add that when I started learning Chinese people made it out like some impossible dream, and when I started to learn to code it was the same (maybe because I have long blonde hair and look like I'm from Florida or something). Truth is its not as hard as you think to become ok, but very hard to master. So if you are reading this and you ever thought seriously about studying Chinese but "don't have the time"... well, Mark makes time, and if you're reading HN regularly then you are definitely smart enough :)
No, I'm kidding, but this is impressive.
And I agree with a lot of comments here: a foreigner speaking fluent English seems normal, yet an American babbling in Chinese seems outstanding...
Also, read this for some good language learning advice: http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2010/01/koreans-english-acqui...
It doesn't mark case or gender like English (and it doesn't even really inflect verbs).
The word order is for the most part the same or similar (German has this verb-at-the-end construction that you not only have to learn, but you have to train somewhat to remember enough context to bind the verbs to the clauses they apply to; Japanese is SOV rather than SVO like English/Chinese).
The writing system takes a really long time and a lot of memorization, but if you're learning only to speak and listen, you don't really have to deal with it.
Writing is quite hard; I'm conversational but basically illiterate.
Perhaps as an adult. But if you do it as a kid in school, then almost everyone can pick up a language or two.
Chinese on the other hand is a bit tougher because the writing is so different.
For example, when you learned English, notwithstanding the fact that you are surrounded by English since you're a child, you had from day one several thousands words of vocabulary and knew a superset of the English grammar (FYI, 45% of English words are of French origin).
I'm fluent in three European languages as well. I can feel that I could pick up Italian or Dutch very easily (I'm > 35 y.o.). When trying Russian with my gf, I don't have the same feeling.
I'm interested in more expanded thoughts on the above. In what way are non-Americans less "direct" than Americans? Is about politeness/rudeness, or something else? Wouldn't that make miscommunication more probable?
First, this is not an issue that's purely "American vs non-American". It's a US compared to Chinese. As a contrast, Russians tend to be very direct even though they are very much non-American.
In this specific case, it has to do with his speech acts and his audience. This is a _huge_ topic, so I will only scratch the surface.
A simple and clear example would be how he answered the "Why are you studying Chinese?" question.
Mark answers with a touching story about his wife and his wife's grandmother. To an American audience, this is very personable, and it is very plausible.
My brief take on a "Chinese-style CEO" answer would be something like this: "Well, Chinese is important for everyone to know. It has a long and storied history, and it is undoubtedly the most important language for people to know today and moving ahead into the future. As the CEO of a large American company, I think that it is only prudent that I learn the language of one of our most important audiences." I don't think a Chinese-style answer would even bring Priscilla's heritage into the response for a number of reasons (e.g., they already know, it's personal not business, etc.).
For reference, my hypothetical response is a kind of DST (search for "DST LOL") that is common in some cultures, even if it is blatant DST.
Note that speech acts are important in all cultures, and that my Chinese example could easily be used in an American context. The important thing to ask is "What am I trying to say in the big picture?". Engineers tend to go for the direct answer, but it's not always the most appealing for a given context.
But, his pronunciation is not good and the flow of his speech is a bit too slow and stuttery in order for this to be interesting to listen to. He's made a lot of headway in the sense that he can piece together sentences that communicate what he wants to say, but I just didn't find it engaging enough to keep on listening. I think he's doing himself a disservice by speaking Mandarin, even though the audience finds it impressive. Educated Chinese usually like practicing their English. Either way -- bravo Mark. You're raising the bar.
I do admire the energy Zuckerberg is putting into learning Chinese. It's not an easy language to learn. What I found interesting was the sycophantic praise from ABCs in the comments section with gems like: "As much as we are impressed with your Chinese, you made a lot of the ABCs here feel ashamed."
[1] http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/10/22/mark_zuckerbe...
Not really. As a native speaker of mandarin, I have difficulty in catching specific words from time to time, although the rough meaning could be understood.
Put a book in front of me, I can get it. Let me listen to someone speak it and I am lost.
Any ideas on how to conquer that fault?
Listen a lot, as often as possible. Watch TV and movies - there are many on Youtube and Youku. I like to convert interviews from Youtube into mp3s and listen to them during the day during down time. Pick a character in these shows and try to imitate their accent (stick to someone your own gender). Try not to read the subtitles (even the Chinese subtitles).
If you want to go further, strip out voice clips from these TV and movies and put them into an SRS system (Anki, Mnemosyne, etc...).
Use a tool like Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Find a recording of a native speaker that has a transcript.
Listen to a section of the recording.
Record yourself saying the same thing.
Listen back to your recording for mistakes and problems.
Repeat the record/listen cycle until you are happy.
Move on to the next segment.
Finally the most important part and key to the whole thing: do it every day. If you do 30 mins of this a day then you'll notice minor improvements after about a month and significant improvements after about three months.
Also, a shameless plug, check out http://www.chinese-forums.com/ which has a load of advice for learners of Chinese.
And my own tools for learning Chinese:
The key is to (1) watch/read/listen to stuff you truly love, and (2) make a sustained practice of it.
You have to socialize in the language, that's really the only way to learn it.
That is true, but it provides a pretty good foundation. Most other methods don't focus enough on listening and pronunciation.
> "I would like to order two beers." but CANNOT, if you rely solely on Pimsleur, say "I would like to order seven beers."
That doesn't match my experience with Pimsleur. Have you completed a Pimsleur course?
I've done Hebrew and I'm now doing Arabic. Pretty much every new sentence is used as a template and repeated with multiple variations. E.g. in Arabic, numbers are inflected, and they teach you that right in the first unit. So if you know how to say "two beers" then you know how to say "seven beers". It's definitely not an audio version of a phrasebook.
> I get made fun of for sounding like a northerner
Being made fun for sounding like a native is a win on my book!
My comment about those two sentences is specifically applicable to people who have done the first dozen or so lessons of Pimsleur's Mandarin Chinese I, which literally contains the sentence "I would like to order two beers" but doesn't cover the numbers until... not sure, I learned the numbers on my own and was liable to have skipped that part if it came later, but I don't remember them in Pimsleur at all.
How about you just tell us what the fuck "DST" means?
Thank you for the explanation.
It's extremely likely they can do that, if they can hold their market position. The business itself is capable of being very profitable over time, and has an extraordinarily low per user cost to operate.
It's not likely WhatsApp will ever be a wildly profitable purchase for Facebook, but it doesn't need to be. Half the point was to eat a rival, the same reason they bought Instagram.
The likely worst case scenario right now, outside of WhatsApp imploding, is that Facebook overpaid by 1x. To grab a billion users, and fend off a huge potential threat, that's easily worth single digit billions of dollars to Facebook.
I don't know about that; the phone numbers of 600 million users ( and rising ) tied to their identity opens-up the possiblity of correlating geographic graph data.
For example, Joe with a Chicago phone number has six Seattle area-code contacts. That looks like a marketable opportunity, why not advertise him some flights from O'Hare to Sea-Tac?
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.
Shenzhen. You're right, 10% is being generous but a lot of long time expats pick up Mandarin not at work but through the "long haired dictionary" method.
I don't know any successful business people that have been here for more than five years that feel it's essential for business. Foreign companies fail here all the time due to not understanding culture, I've never heard of any failing due to the language barrier.
Value comes from scarcity- fully bilingual people simply are not scarce in China.
Maybe just because I hang out with professionals rather than English teachers.
But I agree that general fluency is a whole lot more common than business fluency.
Some of the links are outdated, but there's a ton of info there, including descriptions, vocab lists, difficulty rankings and more.
Other studies are more scientifically rigorous, testing the aptitude of various language learning abilities with quizzes and games, but I think we can infer very little about the efficiency of long term studying from these narrow tests.
Just anecdotally, I live in Japan, and most foreigners I know who come as adults and work in a Japanese environment are conversational in a year, fluent in 3 or 4.
I think the key was that in the first few months of studying Mandarin, I listened to recordings of short phrases and repeated them back over and over again until I sounded exactly like the recording. I spent hours in my university's language lab with headphones on, doing this.
But you have to be able to imitate sounds that you hear, and I guess not everyone is naturally good at this. I'd imagine that people who are good at doing impressions, as well as perhaps people with musical talent, have an advantage at learning accents.
If you have an ear for knowing that some languages use that phoneme, you will be more likely to be able to both hear and articulate these sounds (i.e., your aptitude for learning language accents is higher)
Dad: "Who's my favorite?"
Daughter: "Me!"
Dad: "Are you my favorite?"
Daughter: "Yes!"
Dad: "Whose favorite are you?"
Daughter: "Yours!"