Get best of the week

Jack Ma has a lot of mistakes in English, but his speaking skills are higher than most students. Why is that?

Jack Ma is a legendary person. He is the founder of Alibaba, one of the world's largest online commodity trading platforms from China, a billionaire and one of the richest people in the world.

And many who first hear Jack Ma's English speech are surprised that his accent is rather weak. Even a student who has average listening skills can understand it without much difficulty. But at the same time, the businessman makes many mistakes in his speech.

Let's look at the features of English Jack Ma and try to figure out how it turns out.



Jack Ma was interested in English since childhood


In an interview for Inc, Jack Ma said he became interested in English as a child. In the 80s, the Chinese iron curtain was slightly weakened, so tourists from all over the world poured into the country.

Every morning, a 12-year-old guy rode his bike to the hotel for 40 minutes every day to conduct free tours for tourists. And so for 8 years.

For 8 years he practiced spoken English. With native speakers including.

According to the entrepreneur himself, this has become one of the starting points that created him as a person. And the most important thing that he learned from conversations with foreigners - foreigners spoke differently from what his books and Chinese teachers taught.

English captured him so much that he entered the university at the faculty of English. And after graduation, he worked as an English teacher.

That is, Jack Ma was originally going to connect his life with the English language, because of which he studied it, wherever possible. Actually, this was the main reason why his emphasis is better than most Chinese.

Spoiler: but that doesn't stop him from speaking almost illiterate.

Mandarin accent in English


In China, there is simply a huge linguistic diversity - 56 ethnic groups speak almost 300 languages ​​and dialects. Mandarin or Putonghua is the official state language of China.

Mandarin is the native language of Jack Ma.

The phonetics and grammar of Mandarin is fundamentally different from English. Languages ​​belong to different language families: English to Indo-European, and Mandarin to Sino-Tibetan. Therefore, even minimal parallels are impossible to draw.

Actually, that is why the Chinese usually have a very recognizable characteristic accent during a conversation in English.


An interesting visual video of how the Chinese pronounce words in English and how they are taught to get rid of the Chinese accent.

We will not dwell too much on the emphasis, we will only voice its main features:

  • Vowel system. English has more vowels than Mandarin. Therefore, the Chinese often pronounce both long and short vowels the same way. For example, the words “bean” and “bin”, “pull”, “pool” sound the same.
  • Vowel replacement. When learning a language, the Chinese often replace the correct English vowels with similar Chinese ones. For example, monday turns into m (ong) day.
  • Doubling consonants. It is difficult for the Chinese to pronounce words with double consonants, so they often trick: they either miss some consonants or share them with a short vowel sound. For example, “jump” in most Chinese sounds like “jum”, and “action” as “ashen”.
  • Rhythm and stress. The Chinese very often stress almost all syllables. It turns out a very recognizable staccato with a complete lack of smoothness of speech.

Jack Ma English: Understanding Accent Features


We will analyze the emphasis on the example of an excerpt from an entrepreneur's speech at the economic forum in Davos.


The first thing that catches your eye is the smoothness of the tongue. Jack Ma has no emphasis on every syllable. He speaks fluently, emphasizing only words that are important in meaning - just like native speakers do.

You need to work on this separately, because even many years of living in the United States or any other English-speaking country will not allow the Chinese to get rid of excessive accents.

Take, for example, Jackie Chan, beloved by all.


In 2002, his English was very Chinese. Because in a fluent speech, he emphasized almost all the words in the same way. And this despite the fact that Jackie was fluent in English and starred in many Hollywood films, he got rid of this “staccato” not so long ago.

Back to Jack Ma. The smoothness of his speech allows him to perceive what he says without much tension.

Now let's pay attention to the most difficult thing for the Chinese - a few consonants in a row.

Let's analyze a few phrases:

— I don’t think — , . — [aɪ doʊnt θɪŋk]
. [t] don’t, . [n] [θ] .

— Forrest Gump — — [ˈfɔrəst gʌmp]
[t] [g] . - [ʊ]. . — , . «», .

, , .

— Always complaint. — . — [ˈɔlˌweɪz kəmˈpleɪnt]
, . . , .

— Twenty four people. — . — [ˈtwɛnti fɔr ˈpipəl].
. [tw] . - [ɛ]. people [pipʊ]. , .

A businessman often neglects the grammar of sentences. Which, in principle, is rather strange, because he still has a bachelor's degree in English.

But there is a rather simple explanation for this. Jack Ma often uses spoken English, but he has to write extremely rarely. That is, he uses English on an intuitive level, so little nuances are forgotten over time, errors occur in expressions and words that are not included in his active everyday vocabulary.

If simplified, then Jack Ma has not been studying English for a long time. But while this does not prevent the audience from understanding the entrepreneur, he is unlikely to do anything about it.

Nevertheless, let us consider what jambs are found in his speech.

— If the guy only check himself. — .
— «-s». .

— I fail for funny things. — .
, «-ed». , .

— We keep on fight, we keep on change ourselves. — , .
. «-ing» . , . «keep on» , — «keep on fighting» «keep on changing».

Moreover, Jack Ma neglects not only grammar, but also the principles of constructing phrases. Often whole prepositions fall out.

For example, “if they always complaint the others” . After “complaint”, the preposition “about” or “of” is missing. And in this form, the sentence sounds cut off. Yes, native speakers will understand everything, but still, Jack Ma speaks, although with a pronunciation quite decent for the Chinese, but quite crooked in terms of grammar.

Given all this, it is rather strange to accept the fact that a businessman has a higher linguistic education. However, this does not detract from his merits as an entrepreneur.

His example shows that one can speak with errors, but the main thing is to speak. Then they will understand you. And if it is ideal to know the theory, but be afraid to connect two words, it will be much more difficult to communicate.

Learn English and enjoy communicating with native speakers with EnglishDom.

EnglishDom.com online school - inspire you to learn English through technology and human care




Only for readers of Habr the first lesson with the teacher on Skype for free ! And when you purchase classes, get up to 3 lessons as a gift!

Get a whole month of premium subscription to the ED Words app for free .
Enter the jackma promo code on this page or directly in the ED Words app . The promotional code is valid until 05/19/2021.

Our products:

More articles:


All Articles