Mamdani speaks Mandarin to promote Broadway, and gets good reviews
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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani at an event in Queens in April. A recent video of him speaking good Mandarin has created buzz online.
PHOTO: ANGELINA KATSANIS/NYTIMES
Grace Ashford
- New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke Mandarin in a video promoting free Broadway tickets for high school students, impressing viewers with his pronunciation and tones.
- Mamdani learnt Mandarin years ago at Bronx High School of Science but has not studied it seriously since; the video was also made in English, Spanish and Bangla.
- While some praised his language skills, others questioned the authenticity of his Spanish, leading Mamdani to release a blooper reel showing his practice attempts.
AI generated
NEW YORK – From the moment the video dropped, showing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani looking direct to camera and speaking surprisingly good Mandarin, it created buzz online.
Had he been taking secret language lessons? Faking fluency with artificial intelligence? Or maybe he had just been super diligent with Duolingo?
In fact, the mayor had studied Mandarin but it was a while back – at the Bronx High School of Science, an elite public school that he attended from 2006 to 2010.
Mamdani, who is on vacation at an undisclosed location upstate, could not be reached, but a spokesperson said he had not spoken or studied Mandarin seriously since then.
The video, which he made with the Theater Development Fund to amplify a lottery that offers 2,000 free Broadway tickets for high school students in the five boroughs, was also produced in English, Spanish and Bangla.
But it was Mamdani’s accent in Mandarin, with its multiple tones, that attracted the most interest online.
“His Chinese is actually really good,” a user with the handle @Chinesestreak wrote on the social platform X. “Impressed by the tones.”
State Senator John Liu, a Democrat who represents a district in the city’s Queens borough and is fluent in Mandarin, said the mayor should get a “solid B”, noting his pronunciation, “proper tones and effective emphasis on various clauses”.
But Liu added that the mayor should get an “A+ for effort”.
“It’s only the first marking period and it’s sure to get better,” he joked.
During his campaign, Mamdani, who was raised in Uganda and New York, often spoke to voters in languages other than English, including Arabic, Hindi and Urdu.
A pair of campaign videos he recorded in Spanish attracted similar attention – not all of it admiring.
State Assembly member Jake Blumencranz, a Republican from Long Island, said Mamdani’s Spanish was too good to be genuine, and went on to commission an independent analysis to determine if it was AI.
Blumencranz said the analysis showed the video had “sufficient indicators of digital alteration”.
In response, Mamdani released a blooper reel of himself trying – and failing – to get the lines right. NYTIMES
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.