If you thought Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, couldn’t get any cooler, then get this — his Mandarin is probably better than yours.
If you grew up as a Chinese Singaporean, you probably know the pain and stress that comes with Chinese Language Oral Examinations — speaking for 10 minutes in Mandarin, reading off a piece of paper and freaking out over our expressions. And very few of us would probably be able to do what Zuckerberg has done: give a 20 minute speech in Mandarin at a University in China on the topic of innovation.
Zuckerberg posted the video of the speech on his Facebook page on 25th Oct, and it has since gotten over 3 million views and almost 40 thousand shares at the time of publishing.
在你开始做之前，不要问自己怎么做， 要问自己为什么做？
But before you start anything, don’t just ask yourself how you’re going to do it. Ask why?
He sounded a bit shaky, but the fact that any Mandarin speaker would probably be able to understand what he’s saying without the use of subtitles is pretty impressive.
It does make us wonder how many people in the audience actually understand, not because of his command of the language, but because of his use of Facebook as a case study. China doesn’t allow for Facebook, after all.
