How good really is Mark Zuckerberg's Mandarin?

Plenty of other tycoons, politicians and sycophants arrive in Beijing claiming to be beavering away at Chinese, but I have never seen anyone attempt more than a few polite interchanges before reverting to English. George Osborne, the Cabinet's leading Sinophile, only got as far as a 'hello' on his most recent visit. Zuckerberg was out of his comfort zone, but he just kept going.

Confucius said a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

So how good was Zuckerberg's Chinese? It was good enough to wow the world, but in truth, four years of studying has brought him only to base camp. Mandarin still rises up before him, a mountain that most adult learners will climb for ever, with no peak to reach. I studied Chinese every morning for two hours for the first four years of my time here, but neglected my homework and have recently been overtaken by my three-and-a-half year-old son, who babbles away cheerfully to everyone he meets.

One of my American colleagues wrote that Zuckerberg's pronunciation was as if he had a 'mouthful of marbles'. That is fine in French, where you can just about rub by with a wonky accent, but in China it is fatal. One slip of your tones and all meaning is lost. Zuckerberg was trying to say 'China', but it came out sounding like 'Middle Kiss'.

Still, it is not just foreigners who find Chinese tricky. In September, Li Weihong, the director of China's State Language Commission, said about a third of China's population, roughly 400 million people, cannot speak Mandarin either, preferring their local dialects. And of the 900 million people who can speak Mandarin, only 10 per cent speak it 'fluently', he said.

Confucius said married couples who love each other tell each other a thousand things without talking

Surely Zuckerberg has an advantage because he can chat away with his wife, Priscilla Chan?

Well, aside from the fact that linguistic ability does not seep across couples by osmosis, his wife is reportedly more comfortable in Cantonese (eight tones, compared to Mandarin's four), which is as close to Mandarin as English is to Polish.

Chan, the daughter of a Vietnamese-Chinese immigrant, was raised in Massachusetts and studied biology at Harvard. In other words, she is about as American as they come. Many expats in China claim that having a Chinese girlfriend brings the bonus of having a practice partner, but it is probably fair to assume the pillow talk in the Zuckerberg household is in English.

_{Mark Zuckerberg with his wife, Priscilla Chan (AP)}

Confucius said the revolution is not a dinner party

Learning Chinese is hard. In short, the ratio of effort to reward is so dismal that all but the most mindlessly dogged foreigners give up.

The Chinese, of course, have no choice, and their children have hours and hours of after-school homework, trying to drill the tens of thousands of characters into their long-term memory.

Every person who tries to learn Chinese will at some point hit a wall and wonder why on earth they are bothering. Like me, many will find an excuse to settle on the low foothills, terrified at the daunting effort before them. Simple pronunciation, as Zuckerberg discovered, can take years to master. There is nothing more soul-sapping than enthusiastically going to lessons for months and still being faced with blank stares of incomprehension when you simply try to say hello and ask someone's name.

Grammar is more straightforward, but without rules it is difficult for learners to grasp which part of speech they might have heard. Which means if you do not know all the words in a sentence, you cannot guess its meaning.

Confucius talked of a mountain of knives and a sea of fire

And then there is the writing. There is no alphabet. You simply have to rote-learn Chinese characters, forcing thousands, or tens of thousands of them into your leaky brain.

Anyone writing English can piece together the spelling of a word by saying it aloud to themselves in their head. But here you have to try to remember how many brush strokes it takes to write a character.

Even professors of Chinese find it daunting to be handed a book and asked to read a passage. When my Chinese colleague looks at a text message on his phone, it takes him a good minute to decipher its meaning.

Confucius said, how happy it is to have friends from far away!

Fortunately, the Chinese know how hard their language is - which is why efforts like Zuckerberg's are applauded. I have lost count of the number of times that my dismal Chinese has been praised and complimented, by everyone from taxi drivers to government officials.

After decades (or in the Chinese mind, centuries) of arrogant foreigners arriving in China and not bothering to learn the language, it is a mark of respect to have a go.

Sadly, as you make progress, the novelty wears off. After seven years here, those who once praised and encouraged me now chide me for getting a tone wrong. I suppose it is a sign of progress to be corrected, rather than simply to win patronising praise, but I miss the old days.

Confucius talked of the foolish old man who moved the mountains

There is a Chinese folk tale that sums up the effort required to struggle with Mandarin. A man in his nineties began picking up stones in order to level two huge mountains. When told he was an idiot, given the scale of the task and the time he had left, he simply said: 'Certainly I cannot do it. But when I die, there will be my children to carry on the work, and the children will have grandchildren, and the grandchildren will again have children. So my children and grandchildren are endless, while the mountains cannot grow bigger in size. Why can't they be levelled some day?'

Confucius said you cannot catch a cub without venturing to the tiger's den

For British schoolchildren, there is no short cut. The popular 'Chineasy' pictogram cards are charming, but not a magic bullet. You may learn to recognise a few Chinese pictograms, but they do not teach pronunciation and the sea of non-pictographic characters stretches to the horizon.

The best way to shorten the slog is the most straightforward. While children will not pick up much Mandarin in English classrooms, it may open their minds to visit China. And here, if they can find a place to immerse themselves, they have a good chance of learning the language.

As for Zuckerberg, all he needs to do now is persuade the Communist Party to stop censoring Facebook so that he can spend more time in Beijing.