Mark Zuckerberg Speaks Chinese 'Like a 7-Year-Old With a Mouth Full of Marbles'

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has given his first ever Q&A speaking entirely in Chinese, however some Mandarin speakers claim his language skills were akin to a child speaking with "a mouth full of marbles".

Zuckerberg posted a 30-minute video to his Facebook page on Wednesday, in which he claims to discuss "connecting the world, Internet.org, innovation and the early days of Facebook" with students at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Audience members appear surprised and excited as Zuckerberg begins to talk, cheering and laughing as he tentatively says his first few words in their native tongue.

While hundreds of largely positive comments, written in English, have been left on Zuckerberg's Facebook page, praising him for learning a foreign language while CEO of one of the world's largest social networks, speakers of Mandarin have been less complimentary to Zuckerberg.

One comment written in Mandarin and posted beneath Zuckerberg's video simply reads "bad".

Asia editor at Foreign Policy Isaac Stone Fish went as far as to say that Zuckerberg's Mandarin was "in a word, terrible".

"It's hard to describe in English what Zuckerberg's Mandarin sounded like," Stone Fish wrote in a blogpost. "I'd put it roughly at the level of someone who studied for two years in college, which means he can communicate like an articulate seven-year-old with a mouth full of marbles.

"I watched part of the video with our Chinese intern, and he could not understand most of what Zuckerberg said."

Zuckerberg has been learning Chinese since 2010 after meeting his now-wife Priscilla Chan, who was born in the US but her mother only speaks Chinese.

In 2012 Zuckerberg requested Chan's hand in marriage by asking her mother in Chinese.