Mark Zuckerberg is hopeful that the 'dislike' button will start its beta testing (Photo : REUTERS)
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed on Saturday how much his facility of the Chinese language has improved over the past few months.
The Wall Street Journal report that Zuckerberg delivered a 22-minute speech entirely in Mandarin at the Tsinghua University in Beijing. A year ago, he talked to Chinese students in Mandarin which stunned the world.
The topic of his talk is "why you need a strong sense of mission to change the world," he posted on his Facebook page. He likewise posted the video with English subtitles. The Facebook CEO is s member of the university's School of Economics and Management's advisory board.
He wrote in Facebook, "This was also my first real speech in any language sharing how I started thinking about Facebook's mission, what has kept me going though challenging times and what our mission means now looking ahead for our community of 1.5 billion people," quotes CNN.
WSJ notes that Zuckerberg, who wore his usual gray T-shirt, spoke with no transcript on hand. It comments that his Chinese improved vastly, although Zuckerberg had frequent poses and grammatical mistakes.
His tackling of a deep topic is a big leap from his previous display of Mandarin use when he touched mostly on family and Chinese kung fu actors.
Zuckerberg explains that he opened Facebook, now the most popular social media portal with 1.5 billion members, after he noticed the lack of a website to help find people. To have a deeper connection with his audience, he said, "I want to connect people ... and when I look at Chinese companies like Alibaba and Xiaomi, I see the same story."
Weibo users expressed amazement with the progress of Zuckerberg's facility in Mandarin. One user said the Facebook CEO's example gives him no excuse not to learn English as well, although he admits he had difficulty understanding Zuckerberg's speech because of his strong western accent.
To help further develop his Mandarin skills, Zuckerberg posted on Facebook that he is currently reading "The Three-Body Problem," a Chinese science-fiction book that was the Hugo awarded in August for science fiction.
