Out Of Nowhere, Mark Zuckerberg Now Speaks Mandarin

He discussed "connecting the world, internet.org, innovation and the early days of Facebook" in Beijing.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a video to his Facebook of him doing a 30 minute question and answer session with students at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Oh, and did we mention that he did it almost entirely in Mandarin?

Here's a short YouTube clip from the longer video.

View this video on YouTube

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This isn't a total surprise: Zuckerberg said in 2010 that he was trying to learn Mandarin. But this was his first ever public question and answer session in the language.

Learning the language was one of the many self-improvement quests the 30-year old billionaire has embarked on (others included a famous promise to only eat meat if he had personally killed the animal.) "Doing something for a year, I think you have all these interesting unintended consequences," he told CNN last year.

Also from that CNN piece:

While learning Mandarin, he had Mandarin-speaking Facebook employees come to his office for conversation practice. He ended up learning about parts of the company he normally wouldn't have had interactions with and even had some realizations about himself."I was complaining to my wife one day that I was never that good at listening in Mandarin and she goes, 'Mark, you're not good at listening in English, either.'"
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