[msvan]

I agree with your sentiment that it's impressive of him to have learnt Mandarin while running a company like Facebook, at an age well beyond the optimal 'malleable' pre-teen/teen period. It's also brave of him to put himself in a position like this, where he will be judged by millions of people like me.

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.

[ctchocula]

I tend to agree with this assessment of his Mandarin more than the gp's. As a native speaker, I must disagree when gp says: "He does decently enough. There are errors, but it's not hard to understand what he is saying -- especially for a sympathetic native listener." Large parts were incomprehensible to me (in part due to the audio quality), and the host's repetition of what Zuckerberg said--he does this many times--were a breath of fresh air. Maybe the experience between gp and myself was like the one mentioned in the Foreign Policy article [1]. The author mentions that he was an adult learner of Chinese and was able to understand Zuckerberg's Mandarin better than a native Mandarin speaker who watched the video with him.

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...

[PakG1]

That's not sycophantic praise. That's a common refrain that many ABCs would concede whenever hearing any non-Chinese-ethnicity speaking Mandarin (or related language) much better than they would. The fact is that many ABCs (not all) cannot speak anywhere near this level, hence the comments. I say the same when I heard a non-Korean speaking Korean better than me.