Da 'No Goot' Engwish - Updete For

 Da 'No Goot' Engwish - Updete For

    So people sometimes come up to me and say "Wow! Your English is so good!". And in response, I thank them, embarrassingly.

     People think that having a Blog is having good English and that is not the same, at all, completely. While my current English is good, it's not that good... and that's really not an understatement. The sole reason that I would say my English sucks is because in Singapore there is an unofficial but technically official language called, Singlish, which mixes dialects from different languages to form a type of language. For example, imagine a scene where a plumber is fixing a water pipe for a house owner, the conversation would go like this:

Owner: So can fix or cannot fix?

Plumber: I see problem liao! This part here broken! Need to pay a bit more to put in new one! Maybe about $150?

Owner: Huh! How can! Charge me so much! Want to scam me is it? 

Plumber: Then you want me to what? Fix for free? I got to earn money also leh! 

    If you managed to catch up with that, great! If you didn't, don't worry! Just to summarise for you: the Plumber here noticed that a part the water system is broken and asks the Owner to pay $150. The Owner refuses, thinking the Plumber is trying to scam him. Anyway, that's just one example.

Now enough of excuses, it's time we talk about the ACTUAL ENGLISH ITSELF. In other words, why my English sucks and what I do to combat it. My real English, is not not good. Its just 'Good'. Usually I'd get an overall grade of 80%. Which is good until you realise that my class average is around 84%. So how do I combat it? Allow me to introduce to you the Internet, something 4 billion people have general access to. The most common thing people tell me is "Oh! You must use Grammarly!" And while Grammarly is ironically not a correctly-spelled on its own software, I don't use this software. But I recommend it. So allow me to introduce to you the Autocorrect Software I use for my two blogs, Gboard. Personally, I am quite a fan. I use the now interesting feature called 'Swipe Text'. Go look up Swipe Text because to explain it, takes at least 10 sentences so I'll just cut it down to this 1 sentence. But we're getting sidetracked.

Next is the other problem with Blogger and the English Language itself. English is not a language but like a word-jumbler, think of it as what the Minions say in the movie. For words are taken from different languages such as Creole, Latin, Greek and so much more. So sometimes a word like opossum is not pronounced as 'o-pos-sum' but rather 'pos-sum'.

It can be pretty hard to understand English but worse, we don't have one English but two, making the language a million times more difficult for everyone. There is English (US) which spells the words Color, Flavor and Honor this way while there is English (UK) which spells Colour, Flavour and Honour this way. In Singapore, I am familiar with UK English then US, so when Blogger autocorrects a word like 'Flavour' to 'Flavor', I get pretty pissed and sometimes I don't notice so it ends up in the final version. 

    

But we've not gotten to the hardest part yet. Spelling. Sometimes autocorrect turns a word like 'sheet' into 'sheep' or worse 'sh*t' or turn a word like 'off' to 'of'. But the worse part and my most common mistake is when you misspelled a word to another word. This happens most commonly with you guess it, words that rhyme. Like spelling 'cake' to 'sake' or 'kick' to 'lick' or maybe 'mountain' to 'fountain'. I especially hate it. But I guess that's it for this update.

Happy Reading! 

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