Okay, just a bit of a disclaimer before I start writing what I'm about to...
I wouldn't say my English is better than EVERYONE else, but I do think it is maybe slightly above the average Singaporean. What with the horrible pronunciation and simply bad grammar all around.
I won't say my pronunciation is the best, or I never, ever make grammatical errors, but...some people are just incorrigible!
See, after I started working at YOU-KNOW-WHERE, I have suddenly become the English expert in the department. My boss have been telling me that all the big bosses think I'm one of the better writers around and I really cannot fathom why. Plus, I can crap a lot of bull-shit propagandic stuff so I guess maybe that's why they think my writing skills are not bad.
Okay, maybe I can, but comparing to say, other Arts students out there, I'm sure my English isn't much better than theirs...
Anyway, to get to the gist of the story, ever since I've started working here, I have to read a lot of emails and papers (because I need to write papers quite a bit), and I realise that many in my workplace write with really bad grammar. Some have a good vocabulary base, but their sentence structure is sometimes quite atrocious and I have to re-write for them.
Needless to say, this takes up quite a bit of my time, because they have a strong penchant for writing very long reports...
Also, I need to interact with a lot of my superiors or colleagues at my workplace due to the nature of my job, so their pronunciation sticks out like a sore thumb (in my mind) whenever I speak to them. Not only that, sometimes I don't understand what they say, and I have to ask them to repeat themselves a few times, in the process making them feel slightly embarrassed, which I don't mean to...
Especially my new boss. I kind of look up to him. He's from a very humble single-parent family and he worked very hard. I think he has like 2 Masters and shit.
Like, I think he's the books-smart kind of person.
Additionally, similar to what I said before, he's one of those that have a good vocab base, maybe better than the average person, but seriously, sometimes his pronunciation and grammar simply, cannot make it.
Adding to that, I know all these years I've been telling people that I'm a bit hard of hearing, but recently, after the IMAX have-to-stuff-tissue-paper-in-the-ear-because-the-sound-was-too-loud-but-everyone-else-felt-it-was-normal incident, and a few others like that, I realise then that my hearing was good. In fact, it is more sensitive than others (like my canine-like sense of smell), but the point where auditory information gets processed from sound to electric pulses in my brain, that's where there is something wrong. I'm very sure of it! I think my auditory info processor in my brain is a bit wonky, since I was young.
In my workplace, there is a very common and annoying mispronunciation that almost EVERYONE there mispronounce, and it is the word "time".
Almost everyone pronounces it as THUMB.
What the shit!
Okay, a few things I've pondered over and got a bit of enlightenment after much thinking. Many Singaporeans are too lazy to add the "H" inflection in our words.
Like "why" that should be correctly pronounced as "wh-y", we simply just say "y".
Or, as I've mentioned before, the "r" as "l" and vice versa.
Oh my god...
- "People" as "peoper"
- "Bread and butter" as "b-led and but-ter" (Ts should be pronounced together, we split the "butter" word up)
- "Friday" as "Fly-day"
- Let's take a b-lake (Break)
- A lot of foods for thought (the usage of our plural "s" at the wrong time...)
- Plime number (prime)
So that day my boss was telling us about his car breaking down and he was lucky that this helpful gentlemen went out of his way to help him with the car...
He was going on with the story when he was saying there's this "Kign (like "sign") shou".
I was like, "Huh?"
Honest to whoever, I really thought he was saying something in Chinese or something, (people working here are quite prone to doing so) and I didn't catch it.
He was saying it a few times when my other colleague, whose English is not bad, was telling me that what my boss was saying is that there was a "kind soul" that helped him out.
I felt so bad, because I didn't mean to embarrass him...
And there was this other time where a guy from another Group used his rank to "bully" me, and my boss, who is usually quite protective of me (not sure why...) was angry and scolded him on the phone. He gave the baddie a nickname called "小強", I'm not sure if the "qiang" is the correct one, but basically, that baddie was quite short, and people always made fun of his name as a "cockroach". Don't know why the Chinese like to call cockroaches "小強"...
Anyway, during the meeting after that, my boss looked very pissed off and flustered about his argument with him and was exclaiming about his unhappiness towards him (and I was feeling very touched that he stood up for me!) when my other colleague asked him, "Huh, you really ask him to shut up on the phone?"
My boss then said, "YA LA. This kind of 小強 I can just take by-gone and splay him! (take baygon and spray him)"
I started laughing because not only was his outburst quite funny but I caught my other colleague's eye (his English is quite good too, and we were discussing about the bad English being spoken by people around us), and because his pronunciation was damn funny.
Luckily, there were others in the room who laughed too, although I think they were laughing at his joke, not his pronunciation as well.
The thing is, I know my English is not perfect, and I continually try to learn how to improve and watch shows to learn how to better pronounce words, and I basically feel that everybody at YOU-KNOW-WHERE should go for some basic speak-good-English kind of course too.
I think speaking with the lah, loh, leh, and all that is okay, just not in formal settings, because it is part of our culture, although it adds to the bad English...
No wonder foreigners laugh at our Sing-lish.
I'm Singaporean and even I laugh at it too...
Update: After discussing this with my other colleague. We realise that most Singaporeans don't pronounce our consonants (R, S, T, L, N, E) properly.
And it's true!
And it's true!
