How's my England?
I have a habit. I scrutinise other people's English, dwell upon the correctness and the overuse of certain words and phrases e.g. basically (in every other sentence ok?! that bad) and as far as so & so is concerned and depending on the level of inaptness, either fall sprawled on the ground as an aftermath of the abrupt knee-jerking experience, or laugh my head off at how ridiculous they sound (sometimes suppression is required out of sheer respect) or completely lose my cool as per my various facial expressions that imply immeasurable agitation.Here's an example
The new cabin, behind CCR don't have lamp ( electrical facilities ). So that, it can cause darkness situation and dangerous to staff when enter this cabin, especially during night time. Can cause injury, falling and dangerous animal attack and accident.
To ensure this lamp inside cabin is proper installing and can use anytime. *
---Animal attack? At a chemical plant? Honestly?
Well maybe this one isn't that bad but I've seen and heard so much worse. People don't even bother to add the is in my name is...so they'll go My name Nurul Huda. Geram tau especially if you have to sit through 10 minutes of around the table self-intro.
My English isn't great, what with my limited vocab & all but constant basic grammatical mistake is unforgiveable. And I can only take the piss out of so much horrifyingly broken English. After all my tolerance level is pretty low. The rest would only make me wince, as though I've just been bludgeoned in the tummy with some hard blunt object. Why? Because I feel sorry and embarrassed for these people. Ok ok, and maybe (again, a little confession here), a tad annoyed. Once I tried directly translating an email to Malay because I couldn't comprehend the English version. And I failed that too. Amazing isn't it? And the mail was sent to a Mat Salleh. If I don't get it, how would he?
Yes, I know we should love our Bahasa Kebangsaan more. And I one hundred percent agree that we should. But do you know what the problem in our national literary system is? We are not self-sufficient! We don't have enough resources to support our University coursenotes & textbooks, let alone business transactions and technical professional communications in Malay. Given the circumstances (and English being officially the business language of Modern Malaysia) why can't we make greater emphasis on the use of English at University (kalau kat sekolah tu susah sgt) and not fuss about it the way we do now? More importantly I think the organisation I'm working for should take this more seriously when they are out there recruiting. It's such a shame that we want to be a world champion yet the communication skill is distressingly appalling, not even good enough to be a jaguh kampung.
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