The internet is understandably impressed after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani shared messages not only in Mandarin, but also in Bengali and Spanish, about his plan to give away over 2,000 free Broadway tickets to high schoolers in the city.
The initiative was launched by Mamdani in partnership with the nonprofit Theatre Development Fund (TDF). Students chosen through a lottery can receive up to two tickets each, with seven Broadway productions included in the program. The lottery opened on August 13 and closed at 10 a.m. on August 17, with winners set to be selected on September 1.
But it is Mamdani's Mandarin pronunciation that has captured people's attention. According to the New York Times, Mamdani studied Mandarin while attending the Bronx High School of Science from 2006 to 2010. A spokesperson for Mamdani said he has not seriously studied or spoken the language since high-school.
And yet he posted "演出现场见!"—"See you at the performance venue!"—as a caption to a video that features him announcing the TDF partnership and lottery.
And his pronunciation is all the more striking because Mandarin is a tonal language, meaning that the pitch or tone used to pronounce a syllable can completely change its meaning.
You can see the video below.
People are undeniably impressed—and the jokes came flying.
Born in Kampala to Indian parents—filmmaker Mira Nair and academic Mahmood Mamdani—New York City's mayor spent his early childhood in Uganda before living in Cape Town for three years.
His family eventually moved to New York when he was 7. Throughout his political career, Mamdani has also used several languages, including Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu, when speaking with voters.
Believe it or not, Mandarin is relatively moderate among tonal languages in terms of complexity. By comparison, Hmong, spoken across parts of China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, has as many as seven or even eight distinct tones.
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