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Facebook CEO Zuckerberg’s fluent Chinese

Posted October. 25, 2014 05:55,   

한국어

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s fluent Chinese are gaining attention from the public. Zuckerberg spoke in Chinese during his visit to Tsinghua University on Wednesday as a consultant for the university’s School of Economics and Management (undergraduate department and graduate school of economy and management). Not just reading the prepared scripts, Zuckerberg had a Q&A session in Chinese with students for about 30 minutes, which revealed his Chinese proficiency at excellent level.

Chinese is not an easy language to learn. Its word order is similar to that of English, but Chinese has a unique intonation, which makes it hard for foreigners to pronounce. An American, who probably had not known any Chinese character at all, speaking in this level of fluency in Chinese means that Zuckerberg had spent a lot of time and passion in learning Chinese. Zuckerberg expressed his love for wife, saying, “I started learning Chinese for my wife’s grandmother who can’t speak English at all.” His wife is a Chinese American and they met at Harvard. Netizens are posting complimentary comments such as “Power of love is great,” “A genius learns a foreign language faster than ordinary one.”

However, it may not be solely for communication with members of family-in-law. The Chinese government banned access to Facebook and Twitter since the bloody situation at Urumqi of Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in 2009. The government’s excuse was the fact that a Uygur dissident called for participation in the protest via Facebook. However, another intention behind the scene was to protect domestic internet businesses. While China has been regulating foreign web-based businesses, the homegrown search engine Baidu has shown rapid growth and China’s biggest e-commerce company Alibaba has advanced into the U.S., a nation where internet was developed.

Facebook is now making great efforts to open the closed door of the world’s biggest market, China. Zuckerberg has visited China several times to express friendliness and Facebook opened a Hong Kong office in aims to advance into the mainland. Zuckerberg’s serving as consultant at Tsinghua University, China’s hub of natural sciences and engineering, and showing his ‘surprising fluency in Chinese’ are interpreted as an effort to gain heart of the Chinese government. “If a person can’t speak in Chinese in the future, it would be hard for him or her to make a living,“ said Lee Kun-hee, the chairman of Samsung Group. His prophecy is now becoming a reality.