English

My colleague - Ping and I had just attended an English course. Attending course was always relaxing as we could learn something new, skip office and go home on time. The past 2 days were good breaks from the hectic work schedule. Play aside, the course was also a good wake-up call for some of our deeply rooted wrong speaking and writing habits.

It was also shocking to discover that what we have been taught in school was wrong. Our trainer had previously sat in for some of the classes conducted in schools. From his observation, many teachers had inculcated the wrong rules, especially grammatical rules to the students. The biggest language problem for Singaporeans was grammar, but the focus in school was often vocabulary. How true. We spent time on learning spelling and newer and longer words. The time spent on grammar was mainly restricted to making sentences.

Moreover, during those times, some rules taught by the teachers were wrong. For instance, did your teacher tell you that "to" must be followed by a present tense? Did your teacher also tell you that the use of tenses were determined by time? If yes, these rules were wrong. Did your teacher tell you what were transitive and intransitive verbs, phrasal verbs, gerunds or infinitives? At least, I never recall learning these.

Firstly, whether "to" should be followed by present tense would be determined by whether the "to" was use in context with an infinitive or as part of the phrasal verb (ie as a preposition). Wait a second, what were infinitives, phrasal verbs or prepositions? "To do", "to read", "to sleep" and "to eat" were infinitives. "Look forward to" and "committed to" were phrasal verbs. "To", "on", "in" and "for", etc were prepositions. Hence, "to" might not be followed by present tense as it could be used as both an infinitive and preposition. Thus, "I look forward to seeing you" but "I like to read". Frankly, I never knew about them until now. All the time, I was aware that "looking forward to seeing you" but it was picked up from my reading rather than knowing the reason behind it.

I was often confused about the use of tense, especially with reported speech. I recalled my teacher telling me that a verb in a reported speec had to be present tenses. For instance, "He said that I jog alot." My English trainer told her that the use of tense had nothing to do with time but with the words we used and the consistency of the tense in a sentence. In the previous example, it should have been "He said that I jogged alot" to be consistent with the tense of "said". Certain words like "last", "ago", "just" would be followed by past tense while "since", "recently" would be followed by present perfect tense. We should seldom use past perfect tenses unless they were associated with "previously".

At this point in time, I was hopelessly despaired. It was almost as if I was learning the language from the basic once more. Unfortunately, this time, it involved wiping out all the previous rules. This increased the difficulty as old habits died hard especially habits of more than 10 years. It was a slap onto my face on how bad my English was. This was not the end. It seemed that the way our writing was also in dire state.

The concept of "fog index" was introduced to us. It was basically a measure of the number of sentences and three-syllabic words in a sentence. The higher the fog index, the more difficult the reading of the writing would be and the less effective would be the communication. The trainer's message was strong and clear. No matter what our qualifications were, we should always write at an "O-level" graduate's level, fog index of 11. This meant that we should restrict to an average of 18 words in one sentence and avoid using difficult words if the meaning could be conveyed via simpler ones. Oops, how often was I guilty of peppering my writing with some bombastic words here and there in the failed attempt to elevate my writing skills.

When it came to speech, our Singlish was also disapproved by the trainer. It was not just in terms of the "lahs" and the "lohs" but also the use of too many acronyms, too many repetitions and wrong stress of a word (Colleague: it should be Col- league (Core-lick) instead of col-league (cur-lick)). He shared an anecdote of buying a coffee from a coffee shop when he first arrived in Singapore. He asked for a coffee and the assistant's reply was "can". Huh, coffee was sold in cans here? He repeated his order that he would like to have a cup of coffee. Again, the reply was "can". Actually, the assistant probably meant "Yes, we can serve you your coffee". Then, it was also wrong to say "red in colour", "big in size" as "in colour" and "in size" were repetitions.

I should really pay more attention to the way I speak and write from now on and also keep in mind the rules that were taught in this English class. Old habits die hard. Please feel free to point up to me if I ever lapse and make any of the mistakes mentioned above.