Lament on English Standard

Note: The blogger came back from a 3D2N holiday to Kota Bharu from April 30 to May 2, 2011 and after reading his inbox's many emails, decided to write to Dr JB Lim to express his lament on the English standard displayed by many of his e-buddies. Reproduced below are the relevant email and response:

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 5:45 PM, Tai Onn Lau wrote:

Hi Doc,

After reading the exchanges of emails among our e-buddies, I CANNOT find any one piece of them written without grammatical errors. And imagine they are written by supposedly senior engineers among other professionals who I believed are most likely also English-educated.

Can we not lament such a sad state of affairs in which people don't write good English anymore nowadays?

This is the reason why I only enjoy reading (and like to post into my blog) emails from you and nobody else but you!

Cheers,

Lau
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Tuesday, 3 May, 2011 7:53 PM
From: lim juboo

Dear Engineer Lau,

Thank you, thank you for your flattery remarks about my English.

Can I interpret it as a sycophancy without strings attached? Firstly of course I am nobody, and would not be in a position to favor you with anything substantial except simple dinners whenever and wherever you feel free.

Secondly, don’t I too make a lot of mistakes? You were a sharp eagle-eye spotter of grammatical / spelling mistakes. I made many of these in my second letter to you about Dr Chan. You corrected them in your comments. Thanks a lot. It was just casual and inattentive typing.

I think we all do make mistakes with English whether or not we are engineers, doctors, professors, research scientists or other professionals. We are not flawless, and I do not think we need to be unblemished when translating our thoughts into black and white or in print.

I think all those e-buddies there, inclusive myself, are just casual and informal, perhaps a little careless, nonchalant, detached and relaxed with our fingers on the PC keyboard. After all, we are all just writing for fun without being ceremonious with our English.

Oftentimes we even type faster than our thoughts could dictate to our fingers. The outcome obviously would be hogwash garbage both in content and in language. Poets are accredited with a poetic license to pen in stanza just to rhythm - which under normal grammatical rules and convention deemed flawed and deplorable.

If poets are given this warrant of exception, which is not the normal passageway to the improper usage of the English language, why not an unconstrained exception also be given to our buddies?

Let them be free birds of expressions so long as they mirror their thoughts freely without being locked-up to the unbending grammatical rules of the English language.

That’s my feeling.

jb lim

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On a separate topic:

On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Tan Seng Khoon wrote:

Ju Boo,
This teacher's english is going to floor you.
rGDS
Khoon

Tragic funny

Errrr......teacher, teacher I very hard the misunderstanding your Engrand glamour la.
My almost 8 year old son goes to a government-type Chinese primary school. It's the only type of school that we can afford. Like other little boys of his age, he enjoys going to school. And like hundreds of thousands of other little Malaysian children he IS NOT getting the education he deserves.
While grown-ups and politicians argue about......

Who is in the sex video.
Whether it is 1Malaysia, 1Melayu, 1 Bumi.
Whether one race is supreme over another.
Whether to teach Math and Science in English, Chinese, Malay or Zwahili.

......my son and others like him are required to grapple with problems like this in their Math in English work sheets.......

"Zaini has sell 4 electric water heater which its type is instant water heater for Monday. He has sell 1 and 3 water heater on Tuesday and Wednesday. How many electric water heaters did he sell?"Oh ya, somebody also forgot to tell this teacher that those aren't pictures of electric water heaters, instant or otherwise, they are electric kettles! Okay, okay so kettles are water heaters too. But they sure ain't the instant type, right?
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Dr JB Lim's reply:
Date: Saturday, 30 April, 2011, 6:44 PM

For this one, it needs to be sent to Ir. Lau for correction as he is from a Chinese school. He has already corrected my English for which I am very grateful to him even though I was from an English school

Maybe Ir Lau can translate this boy's English directly into Chinese - word for word without any rearrangements to make this boy's English sounds 'Putonghua'. After all, when Chinese educated students speak English they all think first in Chinese, and then translate them word-for-word into 'English'

The result of this direct translation without rearranging the words makes whatever they try to speak become entirely another language which neither of them or others can understand.

They can reverse the English-Chinese-English translations backward, forward, backward, forward again like this many times until they became 'Greek'

Cheers!

jb lim

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The blogger's response:
Tuesday, 3 May, 2011 7:14 PM
Dear Dr JB,

I am truly flattered. The few (less than 3) English mistakes that I detected in one of your previous emails to me were totally excusable because understandably it is your normal practice not to go back and review your writing (of course in the case of emails only) due to time constraint, or else you could have corrected yourself any typo mistakes.

The problem of the said arithmetic question set by the teacher (not the boy) is NOT really word-for-word Chinese-English translation. If you read carefully again, the problem is actually Grammar and Correct Usage of Words, e.g. "has sell" (SOLD), "for (ON) Monday", "1 and 3 heater" (HEATERS) etc.

Although I am a Chinese-medium educated, I had developed a great interest in English grammar since my days of Tsun Jin High School (an independent Chinese school in K.L.) and was fortunate to have a good English lady teacher by the name of Mdm Florence Chan from Junior Middle 2 to Senior Middle 1 (the equivalent of Form 1 to Form 3 in the past).

Until today, I am very "grammar-sensitive" whenever I read English mails, articles, reports and etc. whereby I can readily detect any grammatical errors made by the authors. I observed that the one most common English mistake written by many people today, including our e-buddies except a few, is "CONCORD", i.e. the perfect agreement of subject and verb, besides others like tenses, active and passive voices, spelling, choice of words and etc.

Anyway, I don't intend to become an English teacher and all I want to stress is that only good English-writing makes pleasant reading. Don't you agree?

Regards,

TO Lau
03/05/2011