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Mark Zuckerberg’s Chinese New Year Message Is Not Quite There

He loves to flaunt it, but Zuckerberg’s Chinese is still pretty bad.
Screengrab: Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg wished the world a Happy Chinese New year on Facebook today. But his Mandarin—which the 30-year-old Facebook co-founder has been learning since 2010—left something to be desired.

Speaking in front of a tacky background with haphazardly hung paper lanterns, his speech sounded forced. He rushed through certain phrases, inserted long misplaced pauses between others, while his gaze seemed to trail across cue cards.

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"Hello everyone, happy New Year! At Facebook, we will have a big Chinese New Year party. At this party, we will have with 50 performances and food from all over China," he said in th​e video. He went on to offer blessings for the upcoming year to everyone and their families, but little errors dotted his speech throughout.

At one point, he used the wrong "measure word" for performance: 只 (zhī) instead of 个 (gè). Measure words in Chinese are similar to the terms we use for collections of animals—a cackle of hyenas, for example, or a romp of otters. The word Zuckerberg used, 只, is a measure word often used to refer to a pair of something, such as chickens or socks.

It's not quite the right term for the 50 performances that will be at Facebook's Chinese New Year party.

Zuckerberg decided to start learning Chinese in 2010 in part to win over family members of his Chinese-American wife, Priscilla Chan. He apparently su​rprised his wife's grandparents when he announced to them in Mandarin that they were getting married, and has used the language since to charm Chinese audiences and gre​et Chinese officials.

In October, for example, he deli​ghted an audience at Tsinghua University in Beijing during a question and answer session held in Mandarin. But after four years, Zuckerberg's Chinese is still pretty broken, and the language in this latest stunt sounds more contrived compared to the conversational tone of his speech in Tsinghua. Sure, the phrases he uses in this video are a little longer, but more often than not, his pronunciation of words misses the correct tone.

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Zuckerberg does throw in a nice touch with a pun at the very end of the video

I asked my mom, who teaches Mandarin to American students for a living, what she thought about Zuckerberg's Chinese. "He still has a long way to go," she said. "He definitely speaks like an American."

That said, Zuckerberg does throw in a nice touch at the very end of the video by incorporating a sheep-related pun, demonstrating some understanding of Chinese culture. With all of the language's potential homophones, Chinese speakers are big on puns, and it's tradition to use a New Year's blessing that references the zodiac animal of the year (this year is the year of the sheep or ram).

For last year, year of the horse, the saying was "马到成功," a horse pun that wishes somebody immediate success. This year, "洋洋得意," the last four words in Zuckerberg's message, is a play on the Mandarin word for sheep, and conveys a person's wish for others to take great satisfaction in their victories.

Zuckerberg's video comes during a time when Facebook is pu​shing for more in-house video content, or Facebook-native videos. Rather than pushing traffic to other sites like YouTube, Facebook-native videos originate on Facebook and track view counts through the site. At the time this article was published, Zuckerberg's video had already received 2.5 million views on Facebook.