For non-native speakers, learning Chinese takes effort - delivering a speech in Chinese is an even greater challenge. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did just that last week.

    Zuckerberg, the founder of the world’s largest social media outlet Facebook, gave a speech at Tsinghua University as a foreign counselor completely in Chinese on October 24.

    Throughout his speech — 2,150 characters long — Zuckerberg related three stories about how he started Facebook. The Internet tycoon not only used Chinese idioms to lecture the students from the School of Economics and Management but also quoted from famous Chinese entrepreneurs like Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group.

    When sharing his experience of developing Facebook, Zuckerberg said his driving force was the desire to connect people.

    “How to achieve a goal is not the most important thing, but why you want to achieve that goal is the key driving force,” said Zuckerberg. He encouraged students to have a clear goal and put constant effort toward achieving it. “Elbow grease gives the best polish,” Zuckerberg said, using a well-known Chinese idiom to stress the importance of persistence.

    Zuckerberg quoted Ma when he talked about doing business. “We are quite large compared to where we were 15 years ago; however, we are still a baby compared to what we will be 15 years from now,” Zuckerberg quoted Ma as saying.

    When it comes to expanding his business now that Facebook is the most successful social media in use today, Zuckerberg said he still has one goal: to expand the use of the Internet around the world. He started another company called Internet.Org to help link more people to the Internet. By sharing this goal, Zuckerberg hoped to inspire his listeners to keep looking ahead.

    Zuckerberg’s lecture was the first time Tsinghua University had invited an international counselor to give a speech in Chinese and it was also the university’s first live webcast course. (Zhang Qian)