Manic Mandarin

As a polyglot, New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani also speaks Arabic, Bengali, Hindi and Urdu. On 15 August, his office released a video showing him speaking in Mandarin, China’s main language, to announce that the city was giving away more than 2,000 Broadway tickets to NYC high school students through a free-to-enter lottery.

Mamdani’s spokesperson told The New York Times that the mayor had studied Mandarin at the elite Bronx High School of Science, where he graduated in 2010, though he hadn’t spoken the language since, the New York Post reported.

Reaction to the video posted on X included praise for Mamdani’s good Mandarin delivery.

“He doesn’t really know Mandarin but seems to have practiced this little speech diligently,” one commenter said.

Mamdani’s Mandarin also impressed Queens Councilman Phil Wong and Brooklyn Councilwoman Susan Zhuang, both fluent in the Chinese language.

One X commenter accused him of using artificial intelligence (AI) to tidy up his words, but his press secretary and chief spokesperson, Joe Calvello, denied it.

Meanwhile, a Hong Kong tourist in Taiwan became distressed while traveling with her 42-year-old husband and their 12-year-old child in the southwestern part of the island.

Due to the language barrier, the 39-year-old woman struggled to communicate with locals in the city of Chiayi and became stressed.

Unfamiliar city surroundings compounded her distress, and she suddenly squatted by the roadside near a train station and burst into tears, with her frightened child also crying, The Standard reported.

The woman’s spouse didn’t know what to do, so he asked for help from two police officers patrolling nearby.

The officers from the Taibao Police Station of the Chiayi County Shuishang Precinct comforted the woman until she calmed down and then brought the family to their office for tea.

Police later helped arrange a taxi to take the family to their hotel, and the husband thanked them for helping ease their ordeal.