Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg impressed and surprised a lot of people by conducting a 30-minute discussion with students at a Beijing business school entirely in Mandarin.

Because the closest most people in the U.S. come to speaking "Chinese" is ordering kung pao chicken at a restaurant, many Americans praised Zuckerberg's performance. 

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"Mark Zuckerberg nails a Q&A in Chinese like it's no big deal," raved a headline in the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Tech new website TechCrunch ran the headline "Zuckerberg Speaks Chinese, Internet Soils Itself."

And ABC News' website ran the self-flagellating headline "Mark Zuckerberg Puts the Rest of Us to Shame by Speaking Fluent Chinese," with the genuflecting lead "How do you say 'wow' in Chinese?"

Of course most Westerners, particularly Americans Zuckerberg's age, don't even realize that there is no such thing as "Chinese" in terms of language, and that people in China speak Mandarin or Cantonese. So it's understandable that those in the States and in Europe were wowed by Zuckerberg's feat.

But the culturally and linguistically savvy expat community in China, as well as some of the locals, were less than blown away by Zuckerberg's grasp of Mandarin when speaking to students at Tsinghua University School of Economics in Beijing.

"In a word, terrible," is how a blogger on Foreign Policy magazine's website described Zuckerberg's Mandarin.

But one word apparently didn't suffice, as the blogger went on to channel his inner Simon Cowell, adding that the Facebook CEO spoke "like an articulate 7-year-old with a mouth full of marbles."

At he least he called him "articulate."

Although Zuckerberg did receive some high marks for his vocabulary memorization, he "showed a plucky disregard for the tones that Mandarin has," said business news publication Quartz.com. "His enunciation was roughly on par with the clarity possible when someone's stepping on your face."

Zuckerberg's apparent lack of a tonal grasp caused him to accidentally say that Facebook had an impressive 11 total mobile users worldwide - instead of 1 billion. 

Despite the harsh critique of his Mandarin, what Zuckerberg did was still an impressive act in itself and took some courage to do - no doubt he knew to expect pot shots from the Internet peanut gallery.

Buy lest Zuckerberg becomes disheartened by the unkind words concerning his Mandarin, he can take comfort in the fact that he's not the first famous person to misspeak in another language in front of an audience.

All he needs to do is remember the immortal words of John F. Kennedy, who stood before the people of West Berlin in 1963 and proudly proclaimed to them "Ich bin ein Berliner"  or "I am a jelly doughnut."

TagsZuckerberg's Chinese speech gets mixed reviews, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg speaks Chinese, Zuckerberg speaks Mandarin, Zuckerberg's Mandarin Gets Slammed