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 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.

I think that the number of Westerners who achieve conversational fluency in Chinese is limited only by motivation and access to resources. It's more difficult for an American than learning Spanish, sure, but wholly within the grasp of anyone willing to put in the effort.

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.

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 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)

> 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.

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.

Overall, I think English is harder to learn to speak & hear, but Chinese is harder to read & write.

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.)

Interestingly, in the video linked above, I think the Japanese panelist is one of the more natural speakers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5na5nHZsww#t=16m15s

She could be mistaken for Taiwanese with that accent. In other words she's 100% naturalised.

Uhm. Hate me for being the downer, but.. isn't he most likely heavily invested due to his wife? And do you think it is harder to learn a foreign language as Joe Random Guy or might it be easier if you try to learn the language of your significant other?

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.

I think you underestimate how much time and effort it takes to run a large company. No matter who you are, learning a language takes years of effort and dedication. I probably have 100 times as much free time as he does and would love to learn to speak Chinese, yet I haven't pushed myself to fulfill this achievement. The fact that he has such little free time but still chooses to use it productively is inspiring to me.

I speak Chinese and it is a ridiculously hard language.

For a more eloquent response (not mine), see this:

http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

The OP linked to a dismissal of this article...

I largely agree that the mystique has to go, and that conversational Chinese is not nearly as hard to learn as believed, but I disagree that Mandarin is easy as a whole.

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.

According to my newspaper reading professor, only college professors who study characters know up to 10,000 characters--and they are badasses. I think 3-4,000 is enough for normal human beings. Anything above that is just downright nerdy.

Well, there you go. Anecdote =/= reality. However, the magnitude of the task remains similar.

I can write around 4000 characters / 7000 words according to Skritter and am pretty OK reading a newspaper. 10,000 characters is much more than you need.

Zuckerberg's Chinese does sound pretty awful right now (although his listening comprehension looked much better), but it doesn't seem right to compare him to individuals that are fully immersed in a Chinese-speaking environment (probably for a many years). Also learning Chinese to speak to your wife's family isn't a gimmick.

The gimmick is not in his motivation for learning. It's in how this is presented and contextualised.

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?