Foreign language one-uppers shouldn’t be so hard on Mark Zuckerberg’s Chinese

Facebook’s billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg created an international media firestorm earlier today after posting a video of himself fielding questions at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University. Zuckerberg spoke on a number of topics, including the importance of the internet and the future of technology entrepreneurship, but it wasn’t the content of his speech that set the tech bloggers scrambling to their keyboards – it was the fact that he conducted the Q&A almost entirely in Chinese.

The video, about 30 minutes long and without English subtitles, amassed nearly 600,000 views and 35,000 likes in just over 12 hours. Not long after the post showed up, the internet began to chime in regarding Zuck’s Mandarin ability.

Isaac Stone Fish, Foreign Policy’s Asia editor, in a piece titled “Mark Zuckerberg Speaks Mandarin Like a Seven-Year-Old” wrote:

I’ve gotten several emails asking about how Zuckerberg’s Mandarin is. In a word, terrible […] I watched part of the video with our Chinese intern, and he could not understand most of what Zuckerberg said. It was easier for me to decipher Zuckerberg’s Chinese, because that’s what I sounded like as a second-year student of the language while in college.

Stone Fish ceded some praise by the end of the post (“[I]it was impressive and brave for him to try”), but it largely left a bad taste in my mouth as someone who’s trying to learn a foreign language. I admittedly don’t speak Chinese, so I’m unqualified to comment on the Facebook founder’s skill level. But as an expat living and working in Asia, I’ve encountered plenty of foreign language one-uppers. My Chinese-speaking colleagues say that Zuck’s Mandarin was by no means fluent, as Mashable inaccurately gushed, but all of them commended him for the gesture. Because that’s what it was – a gesture, not a commencement speech.

I arrived in Japan in 2009 with a semester of Japanese 101 under my belt (from freshman year in 2004). I remembered the basic aisatsu greetings and the most banal small talk, but I was unable to read food menus and spent my first few weeks in rural Hokkaido eating almost exclusively at the only cafe I could find with a photographic menu. Despite my determination, I shook and stuttered through the first day of introductions at my new office – but I tried. My new colleagues appreciated the effort, mistakes and all. Genuine effort, in a real-world setting, is an integral part of acquiring a new language.

Poking fun at Zuck’s Chinese sends a negative message to everyone learning a new language – a noble (and some might say necessary) task in our ever-globalizing world. Criticizing an honest attempt like his serves no purpose other than damaging confidence and boosting the one-upper’s own ego.

What if we held Asia’s non-native English speaking tech entrepreneurs to the same standard that the one-uppers hold Zuckerberg? We’d be holding talented, insightful professionals to unfair double standards. I deeply respect every non-native English speaker that sits down for an interview and tries their best to use the foreign reporter’s native tongue. I’m humbled by the non-native English speaking entrepreneurs who attend and speak at Tech in Asia events across the region.

William Saito, a Japanese-American serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist, once told me: “[T]he global language isn’t English – it’s broken English.” Let’s celebrate and embrace the ease with which more and more people can communicate using broken English, broken Chinese, and broken Japanese, rather than one-upping harmless gestures of good will.

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