Of spoken and written English
23 November 2015(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 23 November 2015 issue)
Dear Kam,
Sigh. Recent graduates can’t speak English well enough to get a job. If only there was a solution. Oh well.
Manglish
I was overhearing a conversation the other day and the thought struck me: Malaysians speak English really well. It’s not a commonly held belief, but actually so many Malaysians speak this “foreign” language as if it is not foreign at all. That’s probably because it’s not foreign. It’s a Malaysian language. I was once asked by an English person how come my English is good and I told her I learnt it from watching Mr Bean. But those who can speak it really well invariably come from families that have been speaking English for several generations. My father’s family has been able to speak English for three or four generations and my mother’s Welsh family for perhaps even longer than that. It is probably rare for a Malaysian family to lose that English-speaking ability, although I’m sure it has happened. The hard task is persuading the first generation of a family with no history of English to adopt the language. For them, English truly is a foreign language, as alien as Italian or Swahili.
I’m sure that the ability to speak English has spread to many first-time adopters since it was dropped as the medium of education, but I also have a feeling that any new spread has absolutely nothing to do with our education system. I suspect that families have been teaching themselves with little or no help from the authorities. Malaysia is now pumping out graduates with as good a grasp of English as a Thai tourist in London. This is abject failure (or the culmination of a fiendishly brilliant plan) but nothing will ever change. For some reason, many politicians still find it necessary to belittle the English language and to pretend it is not important and, therefore, consign hard-working and hopeful students to, well, we do not know what. What job can they do?
Instead, the benefits of a facility with English will continue to accrue to the families that first learnt the language long, long ago. And the benefits will accrue to the children of the very people who framed the policies that have consigned other people’s children to a life of extremely narrow options. If only there was a word for that.
Dear Kam,
My father keeps telling me there’s a difference between written English and conversational English. I say, “#whateverlah”.
#English
For the last five months I have been the editor of Esquire magazine, and the December issue will be my last. Over these months, I have read lots and lots of words written by Malaysians and Singaporeans as well as by American and British writers (although their texts were subedited before they ever got to me). After reading these words, I have come to the shocking realisation that my grasp of grammar and syntax is not very good, but I think I have also discovered some traits and common mistakes.
Many Malaysians and Singaporeans write sentences that sound right in their heads but don’t work on the page. The Singaporean writers I have read can often try so hard to be hip and slangy that their texts become completely nonsensical. Malaysian writers rarely try so hard (too hard) to be groovy but their sentences can be equally nonsensical. It may have sounded right in their heads as conversational English, and I would definitely have understood the conversation, but that doesn’t mean it will make sense as written English. The reader cannot hear stresses and intonation or see hands being waved, which are all important clues for understanding intention in a conversation. There seems to be a belief that as long as it is understood, then that’s good enough. Sadly, it doesn’t work like that. The writer might well be very intelligent and might well be understood, but the writer is also being judged.
Reading all these words over the last few months has reminded me of a scene in the American TV sitcom Modern Family. Gloria speaks Spanish as a first language and is angry because everyone laughs at her English. She shouts, “Do you know how smart I am in Spanish? Of course, you don’t.” And they never will.
Reprinted with the kind permission of
