From the moment the video dropped showing Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York 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’d just been super diligent with Duolingo?
In fact, Mr. Mamdani 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.
The mayor, who is on vacation at an undisclosed location upstate, could not be reached, but a spokeswoman said that Mr. Mamdani had not spoken or studied Mandarin seriously since then.
Mr. Mamdani made the video, which was posted on Saturday, with the Theater Development Fund to amplify a lottery that offers 2,000 free Broadway tickets for high school students in the five boroughs. Versions of it were also produced in English, Spanish and Bangla.
But it was Mr. 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 X. “Impressed by the tones.”
State Senator John Liu, a Democrat who is fluent in Mandarin, said the mayor should get a “solid B,” noting his pronunciation, “proper tones and effective emphasis on various clauses.”
But he 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, Mr. 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 Assemblyman Jake Blumencranz, a Republican from Long Island, said that Mr. Mamdani’s Spanish was too good to be genuine, and went on to commission an independent analysis to determine if it was A.I. Mr. Blumencranz said that the analysis showed the video had “sufficient indicators of digital alteration.”
In response, Mr. Mamdani released a blooper reel of himself trying — and failing — to get the lines right.
